What Is The Unitary Digital Identity Framework?
In a bilateral meeting India has agreed to provide a grant to Sri Lanka to implement a ‘Unitary Digital Identity framework’, apparently modelled on the Aadhaar card.
- Both sides also discussed the fishermen’s issue and India provided financial assistance of 2.4 billion USD to Sri Lanka.
- Earlier, India and Sri Lanka agreed to a four-pronged approach to discuss initiatives on food and energy security to help mitigate Sri Lanka’s economic crisis.
- Unitary Digital Identity framework is similar to India’s own Aadhaar and under the proposed Unitary Digital Identity framework, Sri Lanka is expected to introduce a:
- Personal identity verification device based on biometric data
- Digital tool that can represent the identities of individuals in cyberspace and
- Identification of individual identities that can be accurately verified in digital and physical environments by combining the two devices
- This is not the first time that Sri Lanka is attempting to digitise its citizens’ identities. Just a few years ago from 2015 to 2019, the Sri Lankan government mooted a similar Electronic-National Identity Card — or E-NIC —that privacy advocates opposed on grounds that the state would have full access to citizens’ personal data in a central database.
- Government also tried initiating the project as early as 2011. Neither project was implemented.
