On Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced what he claimed would be the great panacea to India’s health woes – the Nationa...
On Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced what he claimed would be the great panacea to India’s health woes – the National Digital Health Mission, which would provide individuals with a health ID that could be used to access data about their medical history and other details. The coronavirus crisis, Modi continued, had shown India the need for self-reliance and this was a step towards universal health coverage. This is a poor diagnosis of the problem. If the pandemic underlined anything, it was the acute lack of health services for citizens, especially in the public sector.
The idea of a digital health ID is not new. It can be traced back to Niti Aayog’s 2018 proposal for a National Health Stack, a centralised database to store the details of each health ID holder. The ID will reportedly be created using a person’s basic details, their mobile number or their Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique identification number.
The National Digital Health Mission is to seek the patient’s consent before data from their personal records is used by various healthcare providers, such as hospitals, laboratories, telemedicine firms and insurance companies.
Several concerns had been raised when the proposal was introduced in 2018 – that it impinged on rights to privacy,...
