The first steps in Assam of the Apaaren project launched by the federal government of Delhi: each student has a profile in Aadhaar (the Indian digital identity system) in which they must record their entire school history. Concern of education activists: risks of control and exclusion in a context where too many institutions lack even basic services.
New Delhi (/Agencies) – The Indian federal government is developing a single online registry for all students in India, the Apaar project (Automated Registration of Permanent Academic Accounts), which has already begun to be tested in the State of Assam .
The idea is to establish an online “academic bank” to store all the information about the credits that students have obtained during higher education. Each is assigned a 12-digit identification number, which is generated from Aadhaar, the Indian digital identity card. As early as October 2023, the New Delhi government had written to States and Union Territories, asking them to seek consent from parents of students to generate their Apaar numbers, promising that the data would be confidential.
Despite the government’s statements about the benefits of this initiative to improve interactions between educational structures, numerous activists interviewed by the site Scroll They have expressed concern about this process, which is carried out when the country is still very far from universal digital literacy and many schools do not even have basic services.
“This initiative aims to divert the attention of parents and children from the fundamental problem of poor quality of public education,” said Niranjanaradhya VP, an education activist from Karnataka. Anil Kumar Roy, an activist from Bihar, cited the Aadhaar digital identity as an example of the problems that can arise when technological initiatives are imposed from above on a society that does not yet have true digital literacy. Thousands of students in Bihar – he denounced – have been deprived of various benefits, such as direct money transfers to their families, precisely because they did not have bank accounts or Aadhaar cards. “They trust the staff of the Internet cafes to carry out these practices – he stated -. The introduction of Apaar will end up expelling students from schools.”
The government says that thanks to the new data from Apaar it will be able to better monitor schools and thus reduce dropout rates. “But it is data that the government already has,” responds Gajendra Babu, secretary of the State Platform for the common school system of Tamil Nadu, to the question of Scroll Prince. “Measures already exist to address the problems, what is needed is to improve these systems and ensure that they function correctly.”
Activists also argue that a system like Apaar would allow the government to control students too closely and would therefore pose a threat to diversity and freedom in education. Others fear that such a large database could allow the government to classify students according to their political ideologies and identify dissenting voices.
“Schools do not have toilets, drinking water or basic infrastructure, and there are many schools with only one teacher,” Niranjanaradhya added. “The government should solve these problems first. Instead, you’re complicating things by introducing complex ideas.”
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