APAAR digital student ID issued to more than 65% of students in Maharashtra

The government of India’s Maharashtra state has issued 16,500,000 students with the country’s Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR) digital ID, according to a report in Indian Express.

The APAAR ID, a twelve-digital number attached to personal information, serves as a digital registry for a student’s complete academic record. The dash to issue the digital IDs since rolling out the initiative in October has triggered criticism from some parents and students, who say there wasn’t enough transparency on consent, and that the communications provided were unclear.

“In most schools, parents remained completely unaware of the initiative,” says the piece. Among those who knew schools were generating APAAR IDs for their kids, there remains concern about the potential for misuse of data, particularly as APAAR is to be linked to the Aadhaar national digital ID.

APAAR registration puts pause on learning

A piece in the Times of India calls the APAAR rollout “grueling” for teachers, who have had to oversee full-time data collection for six weeks, facing strong pressure from the central government to complete 100 percent of APAAR registrations per its ‘One Nation, One Student’ initiative.

The Times quotes teacher Shamsuddin Attar from Konkan, who laments, “we are supposed to teach, but instead, we are data entry operators.”

Problems are compounded by the deep complexity of India’s data ecosystem. Many kids’ Aadhaar numbers are linked to the cellphone numbers of their parents. Likewise, many time-strapped teachers have used their own cellphone numbers when registering students for APAAR. Naming conventions make Aadhaar linkages difficult.

Data privacy advocates see risks without regulation

APAAR has never been popular with digital rights organizations, who have expressed privacy concerns and worry that risks to student privacy could escalate without transparent data protection frameworks in place.

The government has conceded the difficulty of obtaining consent in “high-profile schools located in urban areas.” Still, it has generated student digital IDs for more than half of the state’s 27,000,000 students, aggressively boosting numbers with its “Mega APAAR Days” campaigns.

Another number, however, that can be estimated with some confidence: 100 percent of schoolteachers are running low on patience.

Article Topics

Aadhaar  |  APAAR  |  children  |  data protection  |  digital ID  |  identity management  |  India  |  regulation  |  student ID