A voluntary mandate: On the APAAR student ID

The introduction of an Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR) ID by the Ministry of Education, to digitise the academic transcripts of every student, aims to ensure a “single source of truth” for all their records throughout their life in the academic ecosystem in India. Linked with Aadhaar, APAAR is far from the first such step towards a rapid digitisation of school records in India: since the implementation of the National Education Policy, 2020, education authorities have pushed the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) and the Student Database Management Information System. While these radically novel technocratic overhauls of record-keeping are one thing, the blatantly unlawful ways in which they are being pushed on parents and wielded as weapons at the State level are quite another. The description of APAAR as unlawful is no mere interpretation: the Education Ministry’s website is clear that the programme is not mandatory, with no law mandating its usage. But schools and district education administrators do not seem to be operating within that reality.

In Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, schools have been given an unambiguous target: 100% “saturation,” or complete enrolment of all students. In their fervour to attain this target, schools have warned parents of consequences in the event of non-enrolment, and State education authorities have rattled their sabres at religious minority institutions and even at fellow administrators, alleging a mismatch of enrolment data between APAAR and existing records. In the initial days of what has now been rechristened as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), the government had similarly been all too keen to propagate Aadhaar and services such as Digi Yatra to an unsuspecting (and too often non-consenting) public, achieving such broad coverage that a formal mandate later becomes a fait accompli. All-too-familiar issues such as name mismatches, leading to failure of enrolment, have also emerged. It is important for informed consent to be the bedrock of any DPI. Else, it risks being mandated de facto. Collecting and digitising this data — with tall claims of security and convenience — should be alarming when the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 has yet to take effect. More importantly, the Supreme Court of India has ruled, in its right to privacy judgment, that Aadhaar cannot be mandated for basic education. APAAR is an ill-disguised proxy that steers clear of the text — but not the spirit — of that judgment. If the government wishes to undertake the goal of improving the reliability and accessibility of education records, it should back its administration of that effort with legislation.