In yet another attack on the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a team comprising of legal and technical experts on Thursday stood adept to the report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance on the National Identification Authority Bill, 2010 and said that not much heed has been paid to the report.

According to the experts, the report is a severe indictment of the hasty and directionless project which has been conceptualised with no clarity of purpose. The team of experts comprised of legal expert Usha Ramanathan, technical expert Raj Mathur and Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Mohan Rao among several others.

Questioning the very purpose of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Ramanathan said, “Despite the rejection of the NIA Bill by Committee report, the enrollments are in the process.” Any executive action when the law making is underway, she said, is violative of Parliament’s prerogatives.

Explaining how the collection of the data, including biometrics is not legally mandatory, Mathur said that the collection of data is being handled by a number of registrars, who have deployed travel agents for the process and it might be in their interest to misuse the data.

He echoed the Committee’s observation that the estimated failure of the biometrics could be as high as 15percent, given dependence of a large population chunk on manual labour and stated that the technology “is not error free”.

The team also noted that the National Population Register (NPR) is also using biometrics as part of data collection is a violation. The team members, who are not part of any body and stand as individual experts, came together to express their disagreement to the manner in which the UIDAI is still continuing the enrollments despite the rejection of the NIA Bill, 2010 by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance.

But this is not the first instance in which there has been a disagreement on the enrollments done by the UIDAI. The ministry of home affairs, earlier, had raised concerns over the introducer-based enrollments and involvement of private agencies.

The Parliamentary Committee report presented on December 13, 2011, had raised questions about the feasibility, ethics and purpose of UID scheme which was underway even before the Parliament could approve it.

The office of registrar general of India (RGI) has also shown some reluctance in the expansion of the scheme beyond the current 20 crore enrollments. “In comparison to the elaborate exercise of the NPR, the UID is enrolling people on the basis of documents and introducers and does not classify as reliable data,” said a source on the condition of anonymity.