Documents obtained under RTI show the govt is planning to use Aadhaar to automatically track every single Indian – from who they marry, address changes, financial status – through the National Social Registry.
NEW DELHI — The Narendra Modi government is in the final stages of creating an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents, previously undisclosed government documents reviewed by HuffPost India establish.
If the plans of Modi’s bureaucrats and advisors are realised, this system will automatically track when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home. The interoperability of modern database systems means there is no technical limit to the extent of data that can be collected and indexed by this master database of databases. In a meeting on October 4, 2019, for instance, a special secretary of the NITI Aayog even proposed geo-tagging every single home and integrating it with Bhuvan, a web-based geo-spatial portal developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
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Five years in the making, the proposed National Social Registry has thus far been described by the Indian press as a routine exercise to update the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) to prevent the misuse of pro-poor government schemes by ensuring that benefits and entitlements reach the right people. The fact that the Ministry of Rural Development is responsible for the SECC has helped further this impression that the SECC update is an innocuous bureaucratic task.
