India’s Digital Public Infrastructure effectively implements Universal Basic Income, at a massive scale. But are users’ rights protected enough?
We’re always trying to keep an eye and ear out for bits of a regenerative future that are happening beyond the usual Western models. This X-post, wondering whether India “has effectively implemented a form of UBI [universal basic income], and it’s having a massive effect” - from Nils Gilman, deputy editor of Noema magazine - sent us scurrying for the I quote in the Economist:
The country’s digital public infrastructure now includes a universal identity scheme, a national payments system and a personal-data management system for things like tax documents. It was conceived by Mr Singh’s government, but much of it has been built under Mr Modi, who has shown the capacity of the Indian state to get big projects done. Most retail payments in cities are now digital, and most welfare transfers seamless, because Mr Modi gave almost all households bank accounts.
Those reforms made it easier for Mr Modi to ameliorate the poverty resulting from India’s disappointing job-creation record. Fearing that stubbornly low employment would stop living standards for the poorest from improving, the government now doles out welfare payments worth some 3% of gdp per year. Hundreds of government programmes send money directly to the bank accounts of the poor.
It is a big improvement on the old system, in which most welfare was distributed physically and, owing to corruption, often failed to reach its intended recipients. The poverty rate (the proportion of people living on less than $2.15 a day), has fallen from 19% in 2015 to 12% in 2021, according to the World Bank.
There may well be a cost here, in terms of human rights and digital surveillance. This blog from Jayshree Bajoria at Human Rights Watch, catalogues a series of worrying behaviours and policy moves:
India has developed its digital public infrastructure in the absence of laws regulating privacy and data protection. There have been multiple reports of serious breaches in these databases, leaks of people’s sensitive data including bank information, and collection or use of personal data by government and private companies without consent or accountability.
For instance, Human Rights Watch found that Diksha, an education app owned and used by the central government, transmitted children’s data to a third-party company using advertising trackers and also had the capacity to collect children’s precise location data, which it failed to disclose in its privacy policy.
Despite these revelations, India adopted a personal data protection law in August that not only fails to protect against such violations, but instead grants the government sweeping powers to exempt itself from compliance, enabling unchecked state surveillance.
Indeed, gaps in the data protection law and internet shutdowns appear to be part of the government’s bigger toolbox to intensify its crackdown on civil societydissent. It has enforced Information Technology Rules, for instance, that allow for greater governmental control over online content, threaten to weaken encryption, and seriously undermine media freedoms, rights to privacy, and freedom of expression online.
The rules require traceability of information that compromise end-to-end encryption on platforms such as WhatsApp or Signal. They also authorize the government to set up a “fact checking” unit with arbitrary, over-broad, and unchecked censorship powers to identify any false or misleading information online about “any business” of the government.
Online intermediaries, including social media companies and internet service providers, are required to take down any such content. If they fail to remove it, they risk losing their safe harbor protections, and may be held liable in a court proceeding for any third-party information hosted on their platform.
The rules also require social media companies with more than 5 million registered users in India – which pretty much means all the major internet companies – to appoint local staff in-country.
With more of their personnel living in India, where they could face criminal liability and prosecution, companies will find it difficult to resist arbitrary and disproportionate government orders to take down content or hand over data on users.