In 2009, I became extremely concerned with the concept of Unique Identity for various reasons. Connected with many like minded highly educated people who were all concerned.
On 18th May 2010, I started this Blog to capture anything and everything I came across on the topic. This blog with its million hits is a testament to my concerns about loss of privacy and fear of the ID being misused and possible Criminal activities it could lead to.
In 2017 the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict after one of the longest hearings on any issue. I did my bit and appealed to the Supreme Court Judges too through an On Line Petition.
In 2019 the Aadhaar Legislation has been revised and passed by the two houses of the Parliament of India making it Legal. I am no Legal Eagle so my Opinion carries no weight except with people opposed to the very concept.
In 2019, this Blog now just captures on a Daily Basis list of Articles Published on anything to do with Aadhaar as obtained from Daily Google Searches and nothing more. Cannot burn the midnight candle any longer.
"In Matters of Conscience, the Law of Majority has no place"- Mahatma Gandhi
Ram Krishnaswamy
Sydney, Australia.

Aadhaar

The UIDAI has taken two successive governments in India and the entire world for a ride. It identifies nothing. It is not unique. The entire UID data has never been verified and audited. The UID cannot be used for governance, financial databases or anything. It’s use is the biggest threat to national security since independence. – Anupam Saraph 2018

When I opposed Aadhaar in 2010 , I was called a BJP stooge. In 2016 I am still opposing Aadhaar for the same reasons and I am told I am a Congress die hard. No one wants to see why I oppose Aadhaar as it is too difficult. Plus Aadhaar is FREE so why not get one ? Ram Krishnaswamy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.-Mahatma Gandhi

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.Mahatma Gandhi

“The invasion of privacy is of no consequence because privacy is not a fundamental right and has no meaning under Article 21. The right to privacy is not a guaranteed under the constitution, because privacy is not a fundamental right.” Article 21 of the Indian constitution refers to the right to life and liberty -Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi

“There is merit in the complaints. You are unwittingly allowing snooping, harassment and commercial exploitation. The information about an individual obtained by the UIDAI while issuing an Aadhaar card shall not be used for any other purpose, save as above, except as may be directed by a court for the purpose of criminal investigation.”-A three judge bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar said in an interim order.

Legal scholar Usha Ramanathan describes UID as an inverse of sunshine laws like the Right to Information. While the RTI makes the state transparent to the citizen, the UID does the inverse: it makes the citizen transparent to the state, she says.

Good idea gone bad
I have written earlier that UID/Aadhaar was a poorly designed, unreliable and expensive solution to the really good idea of providing national identification for over a billion Indians. My petition contends that UID in its current form violates the right to privacy of a citizen, guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This is because sensitive biometric and demographic information of citizens are with enrolment agencies, registrars and sub-registrars who have no legal liability for any misuse of this data. This petition has opened up the larger discussion on privacy rights for Indians. The current Article 21 interpretation by the Supreme Court was done decades ago, before the advent of internet and today’s technology and all the new privacy challenges that have arisen as a consequence.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

“What is Aadhaar? There is enormous confusion. That Aadhaar will identify people who are entitled for subsidy. No. Aadhaar doesn’t determine who is eligible and who isn’t,” Jairam Ramesh

But Aadhaar has been mythologised during the previous government by its creators into some technology super force that will transform governance in a miraculous manner. I even read an article recently that compared Aadhaar to some revolution and quoted a 1930s historian, Will Durant.Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha MP

“I know you will say that it is not mandatory. But, it is compulsorily mandatorily voluntary,” Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Saba April 2017.

August 24, 2017: The nine-judge Constitution Bench rules that right to privacy is “intrinsic to life and liberty”and is inherently protected under the various fundamental freedoms enshrined under Part III of the Indian Constitution

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the World; indeed it's the only thing that ever has"

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -Edward Snowden

In the Supreme Court, Meenakshi Arora, one of the senior counsel in the case, compared it to living under a general, perpetual, nation-wide criminal warrant.

Had never thought of it that way, but living in the Aadhaar universe is like living in a prison. All of us are treated like criminals with barely any rights or recourse and gatekeepers have absolute power on you and your life.

Announcing the launch of the # BreakAadhaarChainscampaign, culminating with events in multiple cities on 12th Jan. This is the last opportunity to make your voice heard before the Supreme Court hearings start on 17th Jan 2018. In collaboration with @no2uidand@rozi_roti.

UIDAI's security seems to be founded on four time tested pillars of security idiocy

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

2692 - NPR likely to be delayed - Live Mint


  • Posted: Tue, Aug 7 2012. 11:33 PM IST
Decision runs counter to the compromise reached in January that Aadhaar and the NPR weren’t in conflict with each other

Sahil Makka


New Delhi: The National Population Register (NPR), an identity database being put together by the home ministry, will likely be delayed by at least a year beyond its June 2013 deadline after facing another reversal in its running conflict with the Aadhaar project of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), officials familiar with the development said.

The cabinet headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has directed the home secretary to take steps to avoid duplication of work with UIDAI and to set up NPR camps in states only after the former completes most of its work of collecting biometric data on an additional 400 million people.

The decision effectively runs counter to the compromise reached on 27 January that Aadhaar and the NPR weren’t in conflict with each other and both projects would run simultaneously.

Minutes of the 7 June cabinet meeting, which were released last month, have been reviewed by Mint.

“With this decision, NPR work has been delayed indefinitely,” said a home ministry official who asked not to be identified given the sensitive nature of the issue. “We had earlier targeted to complete NPR by June 2013 but it will be at least delayed by a year or more.”





Turf war: An Aadhaar enrolment camp in a village in Karnataka. The NPR project is likely to be delayed by at least a year, says an official. Hemant Mishra/MintThe cabinet decision could revive the fight between the two identity projects. The core dispute is over which one of the two will collect biometric data. The home ministry’s position before the January compromise was that UIDAI data could not be trusted for security purposes.

Under the truce reached in January, each project was to use the biometric data collected by the other. In case of discrepancies between UIDAI and NPR data, NPR was to prevail. On 7 June, the cabinet directed Nandan Nilekani to accept NPR data, but asked the home ministry to set up NPR camps in states only after UIDAI finishes a majority of its work.

Home ministry officials said that there was no clarity on the word “majority”. UIDAI’s mandate has already been increased from enrolling 200 million people to 600 million, against the wishes of the home ministry and other departments in the Union government, they noted.

UIDAI and the Planning Commission had sought an extension of the former’s mandate after it enrolled 200 million people, its initial target. That resulted in a turf war between NPR and UIDAI.

“The cabinet decision means we cannot set up NPR camps in the states till the time UIDAI completes majority of the work. So when should we set up our camps—when they complete 51% or 60% or 80% of their biometric enrolment work? There is no clarity. State registrars are writing (to) us for directions,” said a second home ministry official who too asked not to be identified.

The 12-digit Aadhaar number was conceived as a unique identity that would be accepted nationally by banks, telcos, oil companies and other government agencies to serve as a tool to better target social spending by making sure that benefits such as subsidies reach the poor for whom they are meant. NPR’s prime mandate is to satisfy security concerns.

Friction between proponents of the two projects persisted despite the January compromise. Then home minister and current finance minister P. Chidambaram wrote in a 1 June letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that UIDAI was not honouring the truce.

“Despite these directions from the government of India, UIDAI is objecting to the conduct of the NPR camps in certain states and is also refusing to accept the biometric data of NPR for de-duplication and generation of (the) Aadhaar numbers,” Chidambaram said in his letter, which has been reviewed by Mint.

Chidambaram said in the letter that the NPR project was almost at a standstill because of the stance taken by UIDAI.

“NPR creation is a statutory requirement and it is backed by legislation. We have to reach every resident in the country as per law even if they have already been covered by the UIDAI. The only difference is that we will not collect the biometrics of the people who have already given the same to UIDAI, but we have to record their other information. People are mandated to visit NPR camps,” the second home ministry official said.

The 27 January compromise hasn’t prevented duplication of biometric data collection, which the government had hoped to avoid. The government will have to spend an additional Rs. 6,000 crore if both NPR and UIDAI insist on collecting biometric data. The second home ministry official admitted it was all but impossible to avoid duplication costs.

The 27 January cabinet decision said the Registrar General of India (RGI), which runs NPR would be free to collect data “as per a schedule of its convenience” in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Andhra Pradesh, Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim and Tripura.

“Now we are only setting up NPR camps in those states like Delhi where UIDAI has almost completed its work. As per the new decision, we are not entering in the state where they are yet to take up work or collecting biometric data,” the first home ministry official said.

The home ministry officials say they are now dependent on state governments for their permission to set up camps because the latter will need to decide whether UIDAI has completed a majority of its work.

A UIDAI spokesperson refused to comment on the issue. “Both UIDAI and RGI are working in accordance with the decision of the government taken from time to time. We are not aware of any difficulty in this regard. We, therefore, have no comments to offer,” R.S. Sharma, UIDAI director general, said in an email response.

UIDAI says it has partnered with state-level registrars for conducting enrolments in the states and that it hopes to enrol another 400 million people in the next 18 months.

Incidentally, the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) is yet to clear the UIDAI’s request for an additional sum of Rs. 5,000 crore for enrolment of the additional 400 million people.

“The proposal is expected to be considered by the EFC shortly,” Sharma said.

UIDAI’s second round of enrolment started on 4 August.

UIDAI claims to have enrolled 200 million people and issued 180 million Aadhaar numbers. It has dispatched 175 million Aadhaar letters. NPR has collected data on 710.25 million and recorded the biometrics of 30.95 million.

Surabhi Agarwal contributed to this story.

2691 - Fire at UID Data Centre puts 20 crore citizen records at risk - Economic Times



Fire at UID Data Centre puts 20 crore citizen records at risk

NOIDA: A fire in the lower floors of a Greater Noida building which houses the data centre of the government's ambitious Unique ID Project has put at risk the personal and biometric records of 20 crore Indian residents. 

The Unique ID Authority has completed about 20 crore enrollments and has generated over 18 crore Aadhaar numbers till date.

A UID spokesman confirmed there was a fire in the 'Knowledge Park' building at Greater Noida on Saturday, which houses a UID data centre.

The data centre on the third floor is a small subset of the main data centre in Bangalore, said the spokesman.

"Little data was being stored here. Nonetheless, no data is harmed as we have a back up at 3-4 locations across the country," the spokesman said. He added that fire did not reach the upper floor which houses the data centre.

About 150 out of the about 250 servers at the facility have been rendered unusable because of the carbon soot deposition from the fire, according sources at UIDAI. Networking equipment of Cisco and storage equipment by EMC was also damaged in the incident.

The accident puts a big question mark over safety of data being collected from about 1.2 billion Indian residents and being housed in risk prone facilities.

Last week, the government awarded a Rs 87 crore contract to Delhi based Tulip Telecom which will manage data centres for UIDAI in Bangalore for 3 years. The Bangalore based Tulip data centre will house the records of 1.2 billion Indian residents, with a back up in other places.

UIDAI's main data centre currently exists in in Bangalore, at a space leased from Bharti Airtel. It acts as the main storage repository for all biometric and personal records of Indian residents. 

2690 - Digital Identity For A Billion People? Inside India's Incredible UID Initiative

Digital Identity For A Billion People? Inside India's Incredible UID Initiative
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RclLYHORnVo&feature=related


2689 - 'I Sing the Body Biometric' Surveillance and Biological Citizenship



The Aadhaar or Unique Identifi cation Numbers initiative of the Government of India presages a new model of biological citizenship as much as it announces the arrival of India as a technological society, one where social problems such as meagre public distribution systems and primary health services are solved through technical means. Through a series of propositions about the increased use of biometrics for identification purposes, the cultures of surveillance that centre in and around the body are explored.

Pramod K Nayar (pramodknayar@gmail.com) is at the department of English, University of Hyderabad.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Seminar on “Cultural Studies in the Indian Context”, department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 2-3 March 2012.

The title of this piece obviously glances in more than passing ways at Ray Bradbury’s classic 1969 “I Sing the Body Electric” (Bradbury himself takes it from Walt Whitman). But hopefully it moves beyond electri­city to something that generates more charge: biometrics.

Triggered by the immediate context of the Aadhaar/Unique Identification Num­bers (UIDs) initiative of the Government of India, this article offers a few propositions about the increased use of biometrics for identification purposes. Its concern is less with the ethical issues of biometrics – that is another paper – than with the cultures of surveillance that centre in and around the body.
In the post-9/11 world, surveillance has increased to degrees unimaginable outside a science fiction novel. Studies have shown how within a few weeks of the terrorist attacks, almost 17 bills were introduced in the United States Congress, including measures to tighten immigration, visa, and naturalisation procedures. These bills – this is significant – allow tax benefits to companies that use biometrics, and check employee backgrounds (Zureik and Hindle 2004).

The issue of identity and identification with which biometrics is incontrovertibly bound up demands some clarification right away. In a surveillance society, we are not seeking identity as much as an authentication of a claimed identity. ID cards are not meant to identify you, but to validate your claim that you are who you say you are. We therefore need to understand that surveillance works not with a concept of identity (which is individualised, and embodied in the person) but with identification. Identity is how I perceive and describe myself (“I am…”); it is a narrative that I tell myself. Identification, on the other hand, is about an external validation of this narrative: “You are…”. If for instance I claim to be a faculty member at the University of Hyderabad, I must validate this claim by producing a document that asserts I am who I claim to be.

At this moment in techno-history, biometrics includes fingerprints, ultrasound, fingerprinting, iris scans, hand geometry, facial recognition, ear shape, signature dynamics, voice recognition, computer keystroke dynamics, skin patterns and foot dynamics. Future bio­metrics, or second generation biometrics, will include neural wave analysis, skin luminescence, remote iris scan, a­dvanced facial recognition, body odour, and others. Currently passport controls, banking, social welfare, criminal investigation, state controls all operate through biometric identification procedures.

The poetics of surveillance is visible in the state’s rhetoric of recognition and identification, in the discourses of security and welfare that merge into one, as well as the discourse of mobility and “easy access”. Cast as humanitarian, welfarist, pro­active and authoritative, the new cultures of surveillance ride on the body.

In this note is a series of 10 propositions on contemporary biometric cultures of surveillance. The conclusion addresses the problematic question of biological citizenship in the age of biometrics.

(1) Rematerialised Bodies: I begin with an argument I made in a recent essay on participatory surveillance (Nayar 2011). Biometrics, I argued, can be seen as a res­ponse to the increased “dematerialisation” of the human, so that we become merely online creatures, with even s­ocial interactions “reduced” to electronic communications and few face-to-face meetings; the body returns as the foundation of the human. The rematerialisation of the body, albeit within structures of surveillance, constitutes an interesting step in embodiment technologies.

(2) Mathematicisation: With biometric identification processes and techno­logies, the human body is also reconfigured differently: I am me plus my data set inscribed into the UID or any card I might be asked by the State to carry. Thus, while the body remains the centrepiece, so to speak, of the processes of identity, it cannot any more be separated from the data set this body has generated for a machine. The body has been rendered into a set of numbers which must accompany the body at all times. All bodies are, in this account, mathematicised. Biometrics also means that one cannot ever be disassociated from the database of the body.

(3) The Somatically Legible Subject: Biometric technology produces, in Richard Nash’s words, a “somatically legible subject” (2011: 47). What this means is that everybody is at once treated as unique in terms of their biological data and yet fitting into a larger data set of what all bodies are. That is, biometric is positioned at the intersection of the frailties, uniqueness and singularities of a speci­fic body even as what is measured is common to all bodies.

This somatically legible subject is one who acquires two key characteristics once the data set has been prepared:

Cultural legitimacy through the incorporation of that body’s socially, technologically and state-approved set of para­meters – iris scans, for example – into the larger demographics. As the “Strategy Overview” document of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI 2010a: 1) states:

In India, an inability to prove identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing the poor from accessing benefits and subsidies…
A clear identity number would also transform the delivery of social welfare programs by making them more inclusive of communities now cut off from such benefits due to their lack of identification. It would enable the government to shift from indirect to d­irect benefits, and help verify whether the intended beneficiaries actually receive funds/subsidies. A single, universal identity number will also be transformational in eliminating fraud and duplicate identities, since individuals will no longer be able to represent themselves differently to different agencies. This will result in significant savings to the state exchequer.

What I am proposing here is that it is the body’s specific – biological – characteristics are what enable it to be fitted into a larger social domain as a “poor body”.

This is what I am referring to as cultural legitimacy where the biologicals determine, ascertain and validate the access to resources, and where the biologicals approved as determining factors alone can be counted.

Corporeal integrity is achieved through the compilation of data sets, even if the body exhibits wear and tear, ageing, or injury. The parameters used in biometrics are the ones that supposedly, in biomedical terms, do not change with age. What I therefore argue is that a certain corporeal integrity is ensured at least in the form of the consistent data set that is prepared and which only uses those biologicals that do not alter and remain c­oherent even as the rest of the body changes with age and the environment.

(4) Body Privacy: It is fascinating to see that just when there are increased, and often acrimonious debates about privacy invasions – the furore against Facebook’s face recognition software is a recent case (Raphael 2011) – by the media and others, the so-called technologies of surveillance invade the privacy of the body. This is, in a sense, a double paradox. These technologies directly alter the n­otion of corporeal integrity outlined above through their invasive techniques. And, they develop alongside a key concern of privacy. On the one hand, due to the technology, there is more socialising, collaboration and exchange with perfect strangers – with volunteered parting with information –and yet the concern with privacy has never been as high as it is now.
Relatedly, the private sphere of the body is no longer private (if, of course, there is any merit in this state of pri­vacy). If the skin is the first home we o­ccupy, and which we constantly refurbish and regrow, then biometrics breaks down the borders of inside and outside. Indeed, the outside world can now be n­egotiated safely only if one is willing to exhibit the inside of the body to these machines and monitors. Our interface with the world is no longer defined by skin colour (as Frantz Fanon and other postcolonial critics discovered vis-à-vis racism). It is the revelation of the inside, letting it outside, so to speak, that allows us to interface with the world. This leads me logically to the next point.

(5) The Culture of Eversion: The issue of “revealing” one’s identity has acquired a whole new dimension. As debates and quarrels over the veil continue in western society – with countries like France claiming that in a free and democratic society, there cannot be veiling of the face – biometrics offers an entire new domain for this debate. The face, along with the fingerprint, has been one of the oldest b­io­metric measures (photography changed the way the face would be used, just as the impression of the monarch’s face on currency created the first culture of celebrity that relied on the transmission of the visual image). To cover the face has been, Lucas Introna and David Wood (2004: 178) note, seen as a sign of implicit guilt in western societies.

With the new biometrics, the face is not the key mode or site of revelation. The question of the veiled face does not arise because biometric identification procedures delve deeper into the body. With genetic testing kits now available for less than $120, DNA sampling is also slowly but steadily becoming a part of the biometric process. Thus what stands revealed, is exposed, is not the face alone but the very internal schema of the body. I propose, therefore, that biometrics is a process of eversion where the body is turned inside out. (The term comes from mathematics where something can be turned inside out without creasing, and from marine biology where some forms of animal life expel their entrails in defence.)

(6) Biometric Borders: I entirely concur with Louise Amoore’s (2006: 337) argument that the “body itself is inscribed with, and demarcates, a continual crossing of multiple encoded borders – social, legal, gendered, racialised”. The biometric border is thus the portable border par excellence, carried by mobile bodies at the very same time as it is deployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway stations, on subways or city streets, in the office or the neighbourhood (p 338).
(In fact, commentators have noted that countries like South Africa have been biometric states for sometime now, documenting citizens, and those who were likely to be troublemakers. The earliest known use of biometric surveillance in South Africa was, incidentally, deployed to track labourers in gold mines (Breckinridge 2005).

(7) Mobile Borders: What this implies is that mobility itself is interestingly poised with these new technologies. Access to, escape from, and diversion from any path is now documented by the body revealing its passage to whatever checkpoints e­xist. Similarly, geographical or territorial borders are marked on the body when it crosses (the “beep” of recognition when the immigration officer’s device records you have arrived at the border, the electronic tag on prisoners and parolees, etc). It is possible, in other words, to prepare for the coming of a body well in advance because the progress of this body is marked and recorded – not unlike the “Old Cumberland Beggar’s” progress in Wordsworth’s poem of the same title – through various points and scanners. The border is not out there, it directly connects to something within the body, just as the body negotiates with the border beneath the level of conscious engagement. Whether you can cross a border or not is inscribed into your very body. The border’s access points are buried in your body. (On cross-border migration and biometrics, see Ross 2007.)

(8) Epidermalisation: I would now like to forward the suggestion that there is something akin to branding in the way biometrics works. Historically, cattle and slaves, prisoners and criminals were branded. It marked what the African American critic Hortense Spillers (2003) called the “theft of the body” because the slave’s body was resignified as the property of the white man. The slave could not escape and could be easily identified by the numbers. (The most horrific r­eminders of this remain the numbers tattooed on the concentration camp inmates in Nazi Europe.) While biometric technologies are not the same as branding, there is something interesting going on here. Biometrics do not insist on inscribing a number/design/signature on the body under surveillance.
Instead, it assumes that the body is always already inscribed with telltale markers and marks. The numbers, codes and signs are already within the body – what the technology does is to bring these to the surface. Thus biometrics remains within the larger ambit of branding in that it constructs the body as a site of enunciative practices. The difference is in the nature of the ­inscription.
Branding codes the body as belonging to X or Y. Biometrics decodes what is already inscribed in the body and then identifies it as belonging to X or Y structure/class/population. Just as the brand “speaks up” the identity of the bearer – brands are essentially stories that the product/commodity carries upon itself – the biometric data revealed when we pass through a scanner “pronounces” our identities. Branding cuts into the skin, biometrics brings to the surface – epidermalises – what is inside.

(9) Roots and Revelations: Biometrics is only one component of a whole plethora of technologies that return us to the body – rematerialise it – and its identity in very different ways in this age of electronic dissemination and dematerialisation. Related technologies that enable one to identify one’s genealogy and ancestry have become fairly commonplace. In the United States (US), television shows like African American Lives (hosted by Henri Louis Gates, Junior, no less), Who Do You Think You Are?, Faces of America, etc, have been hugely successful. Tracing the ancestry and family history of African Americans has mushroomed into a very profitable business as well.
One can acquire an ancestry kit, use some saliva and discover one’s genetic roots. African ancestry offers an “Ancestry Certificate” at the end of the check. The new genetic determinism that this suggests ends up reiterating the older biological determinisms that governed racial profiling and stereotyping, but o­ccasionally also throws up surprises (as happened when quite a few of the company’s African American clients d­iscovered that there was some white ancestor in their blood as well). More importantly, those who discovered their roots broadcast their racial selves in what has come to be known as the “roots and revelations” culture (Nelson and Hwang 2012).

(10) A New Convergence Culture? M­edia theorist Henry Jenkins spoke of a convergence culture where multiple functions converge into one device. Here there is a new form of convergence em­erging. Bodies merging with machines is now more or less a 1970s thing (with prosthetic implants and Schwarze­negger-cyborgs). But we see a different order of convergence where the subject composed on screen in the form of z­eroes and ones constitutes, also, my body and my personality. There is something inherently troubling in assuming not only a convergence between my iris or my DNA and my overall “personality” but also in the way the digital subject (the body as data) and the flesh-and-blood subject converge. A good summary of this goes as follows (Mordini and Massari 2008: 494):

Biometrics also allow the use of physical identifiers in the digital world. In other words, biometrics permit the use of human modalities for personal recognition in relationships between digital subjects (e g, between humans and devices, documents or services, and among digital representations of humans).

What emerges from these propositions is a surveillance state where bio­logy and biological features constitute the “core” of identity and identification. Increasingly, apparatuses of identification and recognition are put into place where one is under constant monitoring through ambient devices, from the closed circuit television (CCTV) in public places to the scanner where thumbprints are recorded. It is not yet clear whether biological identification of the multiple hues I have outlined above will be a substitute for ethnicity, religious or caste identities, but what is surely obvious is the triumphal march of the body as the be-all and end-all of a legitimate or illegitimate status in the social order.

For instance, biometrics has been at the forefront of draconian policing and surveillance measures in the pursuit of greater “homeland security” in post-9/11 US. As a commentator noted, biometrics enabled the state to identify individuals from/at a distance and in real time (Gates 2006: 418) even as they “fetishised” the faces of “Arab terrorists” by linking facial recognition to the continuous streaming of the faces of suspects on TV and other media screens. In other words, biometric surveillance constructed particular identities as legitimate or illegitimate in American society. It popularised some faces – and, more troublingly, some kinds of faces: Arab, bearded, dark-skinned – as “unAmerican” or “anti-American” by linking biometric identities to the parade of faces for identification on screens and in the mass media.

More importantly, it is also possible that such DNA and biometric identification systems are used to harass parti­cular communities within the nation. When African Americans in the US army refused to submit themselves to DNA testing in 1996, it was on the grounds that such data could be used to extend the racial discrimination against blacks. Native American soldiers refused to participate in genetic testing as well, offering the justification that the sacredness of their bodies would be violated when put into test tubes and on shelves for strangers to examine. In both cases, incidentally, the US government penalised the soldiers (Nelkin and Andrews 1999). Their refusal to participate in biometric identification clearly situated them as dysfunctional members of the American military! In other cases (South Korea) potential immigrants – specifically m­ig­rants returning from China – were documented through biometrics to verify their “authenticity” as family members of citizens, or for the labour force. Biometrics here determined not only their belonging to clans, families and relationships but also their entitlement to labour and wages (Kim 2011).
Biometrics, therefore, marked the arrival of a whole new kind of citizenship: biological citizenship. The UID in India is a move in this direction as well.

Biological Citizenship

Cultures of surveillance constitute, in their biometric manifestation, a new o­rder of biological citizenship. Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas (2005: 440) define biological citizenship as “citizenship projects that have linked their conceptions of citizens to beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as individuals, as families and lineages, as communities, as population and races, and as species”. Citizens, Rose and Novas argue, increasingly understand themselves in biological terms, and see themselves as possessing “biovalue”. Bio­metrics foregrounds their biovalue by constantly calling upon their bodies to identify, present, validate, show their ethnic membership, lineage and familial ties, all on one ID card.

“Biovalue” here is not only the investment biotech companies and the state make in bodies and DNA, but also the value we come to recognise about our bodies: they give us the legitimacy of citizenship, of access to welfare and, as noted in the preceding section, a sense of “authentic” belonging where our membership in particular families, ethnic groups or clans is legitimised b­ecause of the “reading” of our biometric data. Thus, in one sense, in the tech­nologically overdetermined modes of social interaction and communications, the body is rematerialised through biometric data that records us as legitimate users of the technologies that help us b­elong to families and communities. The social order does not quite fragment in the techno­logised age; instead, it reconfigures itself and brings the body back into the picture.

Here is an old race and ethnicity question: does this epidermalisation of identity even if coded into “neutral” machinery and databanks, recall an older system of social order based on skin colour, physiognomies and notions of “pure” and “impure” bodies? Will this excessive corporealisation bring back debates about origins and authenticity of the kind that has resulted in everything from deprivation to genocide? (If the African American story of the pursuit of origins and DNA roots outlined above is any indication then yes, it would.)
While the UID declares that the A­adhaar guarantees “identity, not citizenship” (UIDAI 2010a: 2), it remains u­nquestionable that your iris is your f­uture. As the Strategy Overview cited above states (UIDAI 2010a: 6):

For governments and individuals alike, strong identity for residents has real ­economic value. While weak identity systems cause the individual to miss out on benefits and services, it also makes it difficult for the government to account for money and resource flows across a country. In addition, it complicates government efforts to account for residents during emergencies and security threats.

This is biological citizenship, where the genetic code, the iris, or even the way you move might enable or hinder your access to services and the state. Such biological citizenship has an interesting consequence: it converts India into a technological society. Andrew Barry (2001: 2) had argued a decade ago, that a “technological society is one which takes technical change to be the model of p­olitical invention”. Social problems are deemed to have technical solutions. Biometrics-determined biological citizenship embodied as UID assumes that social and political problems are resolvable through technology. In the UIDAI document above, it is stated that access to welfare and state services is facilitated by having a UID. If we were to take India as an immediate instance, the UIDAI assumes that the unique biometric data facilitates the poor’s access to say, grain or health. It thus offers technological hubris as solution to a problem that has consistently plagued this country: its horrifically meagre public distribution systems and primary health ser­vices (UIDAI 2010b).
The poetics of surveillance shifts the ground of the debate: by focusing on the need for a number, it elides the absence of efficient delivery mechanisms for grain or medical services. It is almost as though it was only the lack of a UID that prevented the government from providing healthcare!

This also means that biology rather than contexts, upbringing or social locations will determine our insertion into welfare, labour or political units/networks. We are branded by and coded into a network which gives us rights and responsibilities. Building on the points made in the preceding section about m­obile and biometric borders, the larger question would then be of mobility: does our mobility across systems and networks depend on our biometric identity being “cleared” for it?

Scholars have warned that techno­logies of surveillance relying upon biometrics have not been investigated for their own creators’ assumptions and prejudices. Thus the facial recognition technologies employed are flawed in the sense they are racialised technologies. Simone Browne (2010) in a perspicacious study on biometrics cites authorities who question the use of these devices. A quote from a report by Nanavati et al (2002) is worth citing in some detail (cited in Browne 2010: 137):

Nanavati et al note that facial scan technology may produce higher F[ailure] T[o] En[rol] rates for ‘very dark-skinned users’, not due to ‘lack of distinctive features, of course, but to the quality of images provided to the facial-scan system by video cameras optimised for lighter skinned users’ … In this way, the technology privileges whiteness, or at least lightness, in its use of lighting. This same logic of prototypical whiteness is seemingly present in earlier models of iris-scan technology that were based on 8-bit grayscale image capture, allowing for 256 shades of gray but leaving very dark irises ‘clustered at one end of the spectrum’.

Browne (2010: 135) argues:
[P]rototypical whiteness is one facet of the cultural and technological logic that informs many instances of the practices of biometrics and the visual economy of recognition and verification that accompany these practices. Practices here are taken to include research and development (R&D), applications, and governmental rationalisation. Digital epidermalisation is the exercise of power cast by the disembodied gaze of certain surveillance technologies (for example, identity card and e-passport verification machines) that can be employed to do the work of alienating the subject.
Biological citizenship also works towards another consequence. First, it minimises the body into a set of numbers, thus erasing the complicated nature of identity itself. Second, this same set of numbers then offers the potential, and possibility, of expansion, of being used for various purposes. The UIDAI, remember, is supposed to be multipurpose. The UIDAI (2010a: 4) states:

The UIDAI envisions a balance between ‘privacy and purpose’ when it comes to the i­nformation it collects on residents. The agencies may store the information of ­residents they enrol if they are authorised to do so, but they will not have access to the information in the UID database. The UIDAI will answer requests to authenticate identity only through a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response.
The Demographic Data Standards and Verification Procedure (DDSVPCommittee Report of the UIDAI (2009: 4) mentions that the UIDAI
proposes to create a platform to first collect the identity details and then to perform a­uthentication that can be used by several government and commercial service providers.

It does not specify who/what these commercial service providers are. Data stored in such databanks offers the potential of monitoring various individuals in multiple domains, a process now known as “dataveillance”. This means that the biometric data collected could be appropriated for other functions, a phenomenon called “function creep”, where data collected for one purpose might end up serving an unintended or even unauthorised purpose. With ambient intelligence technologies – where the hardware for monitoring people is not always visible but absorbed into everyday settings, and “intelligence” is distributed around us constantly – our bodies are perpetually interfaced with the environs. When, for instance, our house starts recognising my footfalls or the door my voice/face, we see the ambient intelligence “networked” with my body, and biometrics becomes merged into the setting (environs) of the body.
The moral of the story is: in the age of multiveillance and function creep, guard your body with care. It is your passport to survival.

References
Amoore, L (2006): “Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror”, Political Geo­graphy, 25(3): 336-51.
Barry, A (2001): Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (New York: Athlone Press).
Breckinridge, K (2005): “The Biometric State: The Promise and Peril of Digital Government in the New South Africa”,Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(2): 267-82.
Browne, S (2010): “Digital Epidermalisation: Race, Identity and Biometrics”, Critical Sociology, 36(1): 131-50.
Gates, K (2006): “Identifying the 9/11 Faces of ­Terror”, Cultural Studies, 20(4-5): 417-40.
Introna, L D and D Wood (2004): “Picturing Algorithmic Surveillance: The Politics of Facial R­ecognition Systems”,Surveillance and Society, 2(2/3): 177-98.
Kim, J (2011): “Establishing Identity: Documents, Performance, and Biometric Information in Immigration Proceedings”, Law and Social I­nquiry, 36(3): 760-86.
Mordini, E and S Massari (2008): “Body, Biometrics and Identity”, Bioethics, 22(9): 488-98.
Nash, R (2011): “Joy and Pity: Reading Animal Bodies in Late Eighteenth-Century Culture”, The Eighteenth Century,52(1): 47-67.
Nayar, P K (2011) “Smile: You Are on Camera! The Rise of Participatory Surveillance”, Rupkatha, 3(3): 410-18, viewed on 4 June 2012: http://rupkatha.com/V3/n3/05_Participatory_Surveillance.pdf
Nelkin, D and L Andrews (1999): “DNA Identification and Surveillance Creep”, Sociology of Health and Illness, 21(5): 689-706.
Nelson, A and J Won Hwang (2012): “Roots and Revelations: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the YouTube Generation”, in Lisa Nakamura and Peter A Chow-White (ed.), Race after the Internet (London and New York: Routledge), 271-90.
Raphael, J R (2011): “Facebook Facial Recognition: New Technology, Familiar Problem”, PC World, 9 June, viewed on 12 April 2012: http://www.pcworld.com/article/229967/facebook_facial_recognition_new_te...
Rose, N and C Novas (2005): “Biological Citizenship”, in A Ong and S J Collier (ed.), Global A­ssemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell), 439-64.
Ross, J C (2007): “Biometrics: Intersecting Borders and Bodies in Liberal Bionetwork States”, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 22(2): 77-96.
Spillers, H J (2003): Black, White, and in Colour: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
UIDAI (2009): “Demographic Data Standards and Verification Procedure Committee Report”, Planning Commission, New Delhi, viewed on 4 June 2012: http://uidai.gov.in/UID_PDF/Committees/UID_DDSVP_Committee_Report_v1.0. pdf
– (2010a): “Strategy Overview: Creating a Unique Identity Number for Every Resident In India”, Planning Commission, New Delhi, viewed on 4 June 2012: http://uidai.gov.in/UID_PDF/Front_Page_Articles/Documents/Strategy_Overv...
– (2010b): “Envisioning a Role for Aadhaar in the Public Distribution System”, Planning Commission, New Delhi, viewed on 4 June 2012: http://uidai.gov.in/UID_PDF/Working_Papers/Circulated_Aadhaar_PDS_Note.pdf
Zureik, E and K Hindle (2004): “Governance, Security and Technology: The Case of Biometrics”, Studies in Political Economy, 73: 113-37.

Monday, August 6, 2012

2688 - Resident ID project clears Aadhaar roadblock - Live Mint

Posted: Mon, Aug 6 2012. 11:45 AM IST


EFC gives clearance despite objections from UIDAI, department of electronics and information technology
Sahil Makkar

New Delhi: Starting next year, every Indian resident will be given a multi-purpose identity card, with the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) giving its clearance to the home ministry’s ambitious scheme against the objections of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and department of electronics and information technology (DeitY) over verification and other issues.
The home ministry-backed Resident Identity Card (RIC), which will bear the UIDAI’s 12-digit Aadhaar (or unique identification) number, can be used for verifying identity as well as the delivery of various government programmes including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY), the public distribution system, and electoral and other financial services.


In the clear: A file photo of an Aadhaar pilot project. RIC was first launched in India’s coastal states after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint

MGNREGS, the United Progressive Alliance administration’s flagship welfare programme, ensures 100 days of work a year to every poor household in rural India. RSBY aims to provide health cover to 60 million poor Indians.

The EFC, which met for the third time on the issue because of differences within the government, on Thursday approved around Rs.5,500 crore for the project and ruled against the objections raised by the Nandan Nilekani-led UIDAI and DeitY. UIDAI has already issued 180 million Aadhar numbers to the country’s residents.
The EFC usually doesn’t take more than one meeting to arrive at a decision. But after objections from UIDAI and DeitY, Sumit Bose, then expenditure secretary and on Sunday named to the revenue department, appointed a technical committee to examine whether the scope of the RIC scheme could be expanded.
The committee was formed in the last week of April under B.K. Gairola, director general of the National Informatics Centre. The other members included representatives from the Registrar General of India, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, the department of financial services, the Election Commission and the labour ministry.
“The technical committee was appointed with terms and reference to check the feasibility of the RIC in other sectors. The committee gave a go-ahead in the EFC meeting,” said a government official, who declined to be identified. “We will now start issuing of RIC from March next year onwards.” Another official independently confirmed the above.
Home ministry officials visited Malaysia last month to understand how its multi-purpose smart identification card, MyKad, worked. The card incorporates multiple applications with several sets of personal information about the holder.
The RIC programme was first launched in India’s nine coastal states after the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. The home ministry wanted to extend the scheme to the rest of the country and had sought Rs. 6,790 crore to fund the programme. The smart card uses a chip that carries data, photographs and fingerprints. The home ministry has been projecting RIC as a national identity card.
The scheme ran into trouble after it faced stiff opposition from UIDAI chairman Nilekani and DeitY.
They objected to RIC’s offline verification process and the cost of the project.
Their objections appear to have stemmed from the bitter and all-too-public battle between the home ministry and UIDAI over the Aadhaar project overlapping, in some aspects, with the National Population Register (NPR) project. A compromise was finally reached on 27 January that allowed the scope of UIDAI’s project to be expanded to 600 million people and seemingly prevented duplication in the collection of biometric information. NPR, being put together by the census department that comes under the home ministry, will form the basis of the RIC project.


2687 - India Insight: A quest for unique ID Published On: August 4, 2012 | Duration: 7 min, 32 sec - NDTV


Published On: August 4, 2012 | Duration: 7 min, 32 sec

The food security bill is not the only ambitious socio-economic endeavor which is battling delays and controversies. The Aadhar or Unique Identity program is also being forced into making some course corrections. While the project, headed by Nandan Nilekani, is continuing enrollments at the promised pace, questions remain on whether it will have the intended impact, particularly in rural areas.

Go to Main Article to watch Video clip

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/india-insight/india-insight-a-quest-for-unique-id/241612

2686 - Left parties submit charter of demands to Prime Minister: Full text of memorandum - NDTV


NDTV.com | Updated: August 04, 2012 12:26 IST

New Delhi: The four Left parties met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a charter of demands concerning food security. This memorandum was submitted today after a five day dharna at Jantar Mantar. 

Here is the full text of memorandum presented to Dr Singh.  


Dear Dr. Manmohan Singhji,

The Left parties have held a nationwide campaign on the issues concerning food security. This phase of the struggle ended with a five day sit-in protest at Jantar Mantar attended by thousands of people from all over the country. Representatives of different States presented their experiences and highlighted the adverse impact of relentless food inflation on the lives of common people. There was a unanimous rejection of the draft Food Security Bill presently before the Parliamentary Standing Committee. We write this memorandum to draw your attention to what we consider are the critical issues. 

1. India produces enough foodgrains to ensure a food security system which covers all sections of the people. The targeted system introduced as part of the so-called economic reforms from the decade of the nineties has proved to be a failure. Large sections of people who require subsidized foodgrains are excluded. It has been shown that in a country like India, with a large majority of the workforce in the unorganized sector with no fixed income, the errors of exclusion far outweigh those of inclusion in a targeted system. With the largest numbers of hungry people in the world, India requires a comprehensive and inclusive food security system, which can only be provided by scrapping the targeted system and replacing it with a universal system.

2. With the relentless increase in prices of food items, a universal public distribution system can also help to keep market prices down. Dal, edible oil and other essential commodities should be  supplied through the public distribution system.  Many State Governments using their own funds, however limited, are providing foodgrains at one or two rupees a kilo. The central food security system therefore must keep the prices of foodgrains down to a maximum of two rupees a kilo. We therefore believe that it is only reasonable that a minimum of 35 kg of foodgrains at a maximum price of two rupees should be provided.

3. The experience of targeting is not just in poor implementation but more fundamentally linked to the estimates of poverty converted into daily poverty lines and State wise quotas by the Planning Commission. You well know of the national outrage against the poverty line figures given by the Planning Commission to the Supreme Court of  R
s.
26 for an adult in rural India and R
s.
32 for an adult in urban India at 2010-2011 prices. We have learnt that yet another committee has been set up to look at poverty estimates afresh. We strongly oppose the linkages between Planning Commission estimates with either food security or other welfare rights and schemes. The present questionnaire for the BPL census also raises many questions as it is designed to exclude rather than include the deprived. This further underlines the urgent necessity for universalizing the right to food.

4. India can have a successful food security programme only if the kisans of India are protected from the volatility of market manipulation by powerful lobbies. In this connection the recommendation of the National Farmers Commission is for an MSP based on the actual cost of production, which is constantly rising given the increase in the prices of fertilizer, diesel, pesticides, seeds, electricity and other inputs plus a 50 per cent profit margin. This is an important aspect of providing food security.

5. At present the Government is holding around 5 crore tonnes of surplus stocks of foodgrains. In the name of "liquidating the stocks" the Government has decided to export the grains. Already 25 lakh tonnes have been exported. The grains are given at subsidized prices to private traders. Substantial amount of this grain will be ultimately used as cattle feed in developed countries. We believe that the grains should be distributed universally. Particularly at a time when India is facing one of its worst droughts, export of foodgrains is shortsighted and will only benefit big agribusinesses. We are against exports at this time.

6. All these issues should be reflected in the Food Security Bill. Instead it is unfortunate that the Bill seeks to push the so-called reform process further by linking the APL subsidy to acceptance by the States of certain objectionable conditions such as introduction of cash transfers, AADHAR cards etc. Cash transfers at a time of high food inflation will erode even the present inadequate allocations apart from other factors such as possible diversion of the funds for other pressing needs. In any case such conditions are an attack on the federal character of the constitution and an encroachment on the rights of the States. The Bill gives overriding powers to the Central Government. The present Bill also legalizes targeting in a new form by introducing three categories of general (APL), priority (BPL) and automatically excluded sections. We find this highly objectionable. We believe that the Bill in its present form will legalise food insecurity and must be radically changed so as to include:

Minimum allocation of 35 kg of foodgrains of reasonable quality per family at the maximum price of two rupees a kilo.

This should be a legally enforceable universal right, scrapping APL/BPL divisions.

Conditions such as cash transfers should be eliminated.

The Food Security Bill should be suitably amended and presented in the forthcoming session of Parliament.

We hope that you will consider our views and take appropriate action.

With regards

(Prakash Karat)                                         
General Secretary, CPI(M)                       

(S. Sudhakar Reddy)
General Secretary, CPI

(Debabrata Biswas)                                   
General Secretary, AIFB                          

(Abani Roy)
Secretary, RSP


2685 - UIDAI bites the dust as resident ID card gets nod - DNA


Published: Saturday, Aug 4, 2012, 9:30 IST | Updated: Saturday, Aug 4, 2012, 1:11 IST 
By Manan Kumar | Place: New Delhi | Agency: DNA

Nandan Nilekani-headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has bitten the dust with the expenditure finance committee (EFC) overruling its objections and clearing the Union home ministry’s Resident Identity Card (RIC) for offline usage of applications in targeted social welfare schemes such as MNREGA.

In a meeting held on Thursday, the committee also cleared Rs 5,500 crore outlay for the RIC, thus removing all hurdles from the Registrar General of India’s way to launch the Union home ministry’s ambitious project to equip every usual resident of the country with a 64 kb micro-chip based card having biometrics features for security and authentication purposes.

The EFC’s decision comes in the wake of the view taken by a sub-committee headed by director general of National Informatics Centre (NIC) Dr B K Gairola that was given the task of examining if the proposed RIC, primarily meant to serve as a security tool, can also be used as a platform for multiple usages such as delivery of targeted services like MNREGA, public distribution system and health insurance (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna), other financial purposes and for election purposes.

Many government departments claimed that in the Indian scenario where internet network is still not trustworthy and is totally absent in several huge patches of the hinterland, offline platform with the help of handheld devices is a better bet to ensure good delivery results.

Sources said the RGI will soon start the process of tendering for the RIC that will have Aadhaar number printed on it and would start giving it to the residents from March.


2684 - Poverty plunged under UPA rule, claims govt study - Hindustan Times


Chetan Chauhan, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, August 02, 2012

The UPA government’s economic policies have resulted in record reduction of poverty over the last two years, with the individual’s monthly expenditure rising by around 18% per annum, the highest since 1987, government data released a week before the Parliament’s monsoon session claimed.

The government’s National Sample Survey Organisation released the provisional data of the Household Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2011-12 on Wednesday. The study is the most crucial input for the Planning Commission to compute the extent of poverty in the country.

Pranob Sen, former chief statistician of India and the panel’s principal advisor, said the increase in per capita expenditure shows that poverty came down by 2 percentage points every year between 2009-10 and 2011-12, the highest since Independence.

The average per-annum poverty reduction from Independence till 2004-05 — when the UPA came to power — was around 0.8%. It fell at the rate of 1.21% per annum between 2004-05 and 2009-10, the plan panel's press note on poverty estimation — released in March 2012 — said.

If one goes by the latest consumer expenditure survey data, around 24% of 1.2 billion Indians should be categorised as poor. The average per capita expenditure — after adjusting the inflation — rose by about 4.5% per annum, especially in rural India, Sen said.


The average per capita expenditure in 2004-05 was R558 for rural India and R1,052 for urban India. It increased to R1,281 for rural India and R2,401 for urban India in 2011-12, the NSSO said on Wednesday.

The increase in rural expenditure can be attributed to the higher selling price of agriculture produce. Although the per capita expenditure has more than doubled in urban India, experts say it could be because of inflationary impact.
On the flip side, NSSO data revealed that the gap between the richest 10% and the poorest 10% Indians had widened. While the difference in monthly expenditure between them was 5.6 times in 2004-05, it rose to 6.9 times in 2011-12 in rural India. In urban areas, it was 9.8 and 10.9 times respectively.


2683 - ‘PM to announce UID-Aadhar linked bank accounts‘


INDIAKumardeep, BloombergUTV.Aug 3, 2012, 12:40PM IST


The government will need to step up spending to negate the impact of the drought. However, in a fiscally constrained year, it is going to have to ensure minimum leakages in subsidy payouts.

Bloomberg UTV has learnt that the Prime Minister is likely to announce a UID-Aadhar linked bank account scheme around his annual Independence Day speech.

According to sources, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may announce the scheme around August 15. “The scheme will be implemented on pan-India basis,” they added.

Sources further said that cash subsidies will be directly transferred to these accounts. “Rs 3 lakh crore of cash subsidies will go through banks and is likely to kick off end of the year.”

2682 - Tulip sets up Rs 900-cr data centre


Tulip sets up Rs 900-cr data centre

OUR BUREAU

Lt Col H.S. Bedi
BANGALORE, FEB. 6: 

Enterprise data services company Tulip Telecom has established a 9 lakh sq ft data centre ‘Tulip Data City' here, the world's third largest data centre, at a total investment of Rs 900 crore.

“The company has made an immediate investment of Rs 230 crore and has secured loans for Rs 50 crore from leading banks,” Lt Col H.S. Bedi, Chairman and Managing Director of Tulip Telecom, said. The company is planning to raise another Rs 250 crore through debt, Rs 250 crore through equity and will fund the rest using internal accruals, he added.

“We might also look at strategic partners for the business,” he added. With more companies moving to professional data centres for their storage needs, the telecom company expects the entire facility to be occupied in three years.

RS 600-CR ORDERS

Tulip Data City, the 100 per cent subsidiary data centre of Tulip Telecom, currently has orders worth Rs 600 crore from IBM, NTT and HP.

“About 20 per cent of the data centre has already been booked by three customers and we expect it to be fully contracted in three years,” Lt Col Bedi said. Tulip Data City expects to earn revenues of Rs 1,000 crore once the data centre is fully operational.

The facility was inaugurated by Mr Sachin Pilot, Minister of State for Communications and IT. “The future will be decided based on who owns the data, and currently, a large part of our data is owned outside India… so it is extremely important to have a data centre here,” Mr Pilot said after the inauguration.

Tulip Data City is Tulip Telecom's fifth data centre and Lt Col Bedi said that once this centre takes off, the company could consider bringing other data centres under this. The servers at Tulip Data City consume about 100 MW of power in peak but it is still lower than where the servers were earlier used where they consumer about 130 MW power, Lt Col Bedi said.

The company draws 20 MW from the Bangalore Electricity and Supply and Company and is planning to source the remaining power from other entities, he said
.

Tulip Telecom bags Rs 87-cr UIDAI order

R. Y. NARAYANAN

COIMBATORE, AUG 1: 

Tulip Telecom Ltd, an Enterprise Data Services provider, has got a Rs 87.23-crore order from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for hosting data centre space.

Tulip Telecom would host UIDAI servers from Tulip Data City based out of Bangalore for UIDAI’s unique ID project ‘Adhaar’. The duration of the project is three years, which will be extended further.

The company said that Tulip would provide premium data centre space to UIDAI to host IT infrastructure and also offer support area.

2681 - ‘Stop repeated collection of biometric details’ - The Hindu



Akshaya Coordination Committee, representing 2,200 Akshaya service centres in the State under Kerala IT Mission, has called for an end to repeated collection of biometric details at National Population Registry camps.
Causing inconvenience
Office-bearers of the committee told a press conference here on Monday that repeated collection of biometric details at NPR camps caused inconvenience for the public and paved the way for private companies “to loot the exchequer.”
They said that biometric details already collected at the Adhar camps were being collected again at the NPR camps. This must end in the best interest of the public and the exchequer, they said.
They also want the government to make it compulsory for those coming to the NPR camps to bring either their UID card or their enrolment slip issued at the registration for UID cards.
Need for publicity
The Coordination Committee wants the government to provide wide publicity to UIDAI and to the welfare measures that the government planned to carry out using the unique identification number. The public should also be made aware of the importance and need for Adhar enrolment.

2680 - RESOLUTIONS: JIH Central Advisory Council (Shoora) Session held on 30 Dec, 31 Dec. 2011 and 1 Jan. 2012

RESOLUTIONS
JIH Central Advisory Council (Shoora) Session
held on 30 Dec, 31 Dec. 2011 and 1 Jan. 2012

Chennai: The Central Advisory Council (Shoora) Session of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind was held here on 30th, 31st December 2011 and 1st January 2012 with Amir (President) JIH Maulana Syed Jalaluddin Omari in the chair and all the 19 members of the CAC participating therein. Following deliberations on the various issues including certain important ones confronting the country and the community, the CAC adopted the following Resolutions:

1. AADHAAR Scheme:
This session of CAC of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind seriously feels that the objectives and methodology of issuance of Unique Identification Card and Number to the citizens of the country under the Aadhaar Scheme have created an atmosphere of doubt and distrust in the entire country. The decision to issue identity cards to the citizens was taken in a meeting of Group of Ministers during the NDA regime; its objective was to contain illegal infiltration in the country and for this it was decided to issue identity cards to the citizens. Now it is said that Aadhaar and UID card is no proof of citizenship.
Aadhaar Scheme is not only violating the citizenship right of citizens, rule of law and fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution of India but also becoming a source of economic exploitation, increase in deprivation of poor and backward sections, State profiling of individuals, violation of right to protection of personal life, and depriving citizens of benefits and services. Thus with this scheme national and international agencies, financial institutions, business enterprises and insurance agencies are being benefited. According to the details of UID project that have come to light, the expenditure on this project will come at Rs. 50 thousand crore. Such a large amount will be paid out of the tax paid by poor citizens. Before implementing such a mega project, it was neither granted nod in the Parliament after due deliberations nor was any legislation enacted.
It is being said that it would be optional but after attaching it to the various benefits and services this identity card and number will be mandatory. A person who does not have this card and number will stand deprived of these benefits and services. That is why National Human Rights Commission has termed this project as erroneous and a scheme to deprive people of their rights.
After attaching the unique identity number with every issue concerning the personal life of an individual, it would be possible not only for the Government but for all those institutions and agencies which are related to this number to peep into his personal life and activities. Thus the fundamental right to protection of personal life will be badly affected.
Human rights activists and legal luminaries have expressed apprehension that it would pave the way for profiling of citizens of the country, especially of deprived sections and minorities; and there is a threat of their well-being being affected.
Unique Identity Card Authority has signed agreements with national and international agencies and financial institutions, whereby they can be attached with Aadhaar Scheme though the Authority has no legal provision for this. Now it has been said in the draft legislation that whatever agreements and activities would have been undertaken by the Authority in this regard till the enactment of law, would be deemed valid right from their previous dates.
UID Authority has also said that all social welfare schemes would be attached to the Aadhaar Scheme. In such a country of dense population, in which everyone has not been able to get voter card, the availability of Aadhaar card and number to all is very much difficult. Therefore, it is apprehended that the poor people of the country would stay deprived of the welfare schemes like Ration Card and Grameen Yojna due only to the unavailability of Aadhaar Card.
The CAC expresses its utter surprise that when the countries like USA, UK and Australia have annulled such schemes due to extraordinary expenditure and violation of the right to protection of personal life of people, how a poor country like India would be able to bear the exorbitantly huge burden of Rs. 50 thousand crore.
To implement the Aadhaar Scheme, the Government has hired the services of 209 private companies, which are not only reaping monetary benefits from this but also would be able to access personal information of people. It is apprehended that these companies would exploit this information for their materialistic and other gains. Similarly, the national and international companies with whom software has been purchased have also paved the way for illegal access of such information. That is why intellectuals and legal luminaries in the country have opposed this scheme in the severest terms and demanded its immediate withdrawal, declaring it illegal and unconstitutional.
Aadhaar Scheme deems it mandatory to record fingerprint marks and biometric eye scanning while there is no legal provision for subjecting our own citizens to this treatment. Generally this process is required for identification of criminals.
Keeping in view all the above-mentioned doubts and apprehensions, the CAC of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind demands from Government of India to put an immediate end to this Scheme. It would be in the fitness of things if the Government brings in a practicable, apprehension-free scheme only after removing these apprehensions following public discussion and debate in Parliament, having expert opinion on its importance and advantages, enacting a law on protection of personal life, and winning confidence of people. Otherwise the entire scheme should be annulled.

2. Lokpal:
There can be no denying the need and importance of Lokpal to root out corruption from the country. There must be some authority that can contain corruption and irregularities at high levels. This was the concept of Lokpal in the beginning but later on this issue got politicised. The hue and cry going on for the last one year and political games being played on the issue bring into light that both the major political parties in the country, Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party, have nothing to do with the real issue. They are only striving as per their respective agenda to save and grab power. The approach of other political parties and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to this issue is also not good.
This session of the CAC of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind appeals to the Government, all political parties and NGOs that they, having gone above electoral politics and petty benefits, solve this issue and create an atmosphere for appointment of such a Lokpal as can have full powers and cover Prime Minister, CBI, all responsible functionaries, Members of Parliament, State Assemblies and Councils, corporate sectors and NGOs. A person having clean image and trustworthy character besides academic excellence and legal acumen, and is known thus in the society, should be appointed on this post. The CAC demands that the committee to be formed for selection of Lokpal must include representatives of backward castes and minorities.
This session of the CAC also draws the attention of the Government, politicians and the public to the fact that evils like corruption, embezzlement and misappropriation cannot be wiped out with mere legislation; to act upon laws with a sense of honesty and responsibility is also necessary, and this acting upon is possible only when people nurture fear of God in their hearts, they believe that their Creator and Lord is keeping a constant watch over them and they have to stand before God to account for whatever they are doing.

3. Food Security Bill:
To the CAC of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind it is a pleasure that after a pretty long time the Government has decided to pass the Food Security Bill. And a draft on the Bill has been finalised in the Cabinet. This session of the CAC hopes that this Bill will be enacted into a law during the Budget Session and the UPA Government will keep its long-due promise.
Jamaat-e-Islami Hind laments that the draft Bill that has been given final touch after such a long time and after a long series of discussions and debates is erroneous from different aspects. The Jamaat believes that even after enacting the law every citizen of India will not be able to have the right to food security. In the proposed legislation the citizens of the country have been divided into Targeted and General categories, and food security has been guaranteed only to the Targeted Section. It is apprehended that a large chunk of Indian population rather a large chunk of the poor also will be deprived of food security. To this session of the CAC this is gross injustice to the poor public. The social survey being done to determine the Targeted Section is also based on amazing misapprehensions. According to information, if a widow has an 18-year old son, she would not be deemed poor. While in the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme the minimum age limit for employment is 18 years. Social organisations have pin-pointed such lacunae and discrepancies with regard to this survey.
Jamaat-e-Islami Hind is also concerned over the fact that providing food for the citizens belonging to the General category has been made conditional to reform in public distribution system. And the picture of reform in public distribution system drawn in a separate chapter of the legislation is highly objectionable. It includes controversial measures like transfer of direct funds and linking Aadhaar Card with food distribution. Also, there is no mention in the proposed legislation of any intention to act upon the instructions given by the Supreme Court to distribute surplus foodgrains piled in godowns.
This session of the CAC demands that the Government effect necessary amendments in the Bill before the Budget Session and declare it mandatory to make 35 kgs foodgrains and other food items on low cost available to every citizen of India.
The CAC session also support the demand that the legislation should guarantee nutritious diet to children, food requirements to expected women and special food requirements to those suffering from some ailments.
The CAC session demands that Right to Livelihood including facilities for food, clothes, house, education and medical treatment be guaranteed in the Constitution as a right of Indian citizens.

4. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Movement:
This CAC session of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind expresses its interest in the issues raised by protestors of Occupy Wall Street Movement. These protestors are raising most important issues of the entire world. Ever rising gap between the rich and the poor and policies based on exploitation of unemployment and the poor have now become the common issue of the entire world. And now the situation is touching its lowest ebb.
The causes of economic slowdown [afflicting the world] for the last three or four years have been merciless capitalistic policies based on interest-based economy, exploitation, cheating and greed. In spite of the reality having come to light, the same mistakes are being repeated instead of taking reform measures. Banks and financial institutions are being given bailout packages worth millions of dollars but no attention is being paid to the poor unemployed people affected by the disaster. After America, the economic disaster is demolishing big economies in Europe. But there too the real causes of the disaster are being neglected, and exploiting capitalists are being supported with bailout packages and the real needs of poor public are being neglected.
Expressing sympathy with the protestors of Wall Street, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind draws their attention to the fact that the solution does not lie in expressing anger and grief and staging protests. The world now needs an alternate economic system; and economic and financial system of Islam, which is free from interest, gambling, speculation and forward trading, and is based on the values of real equity and justice, has the full strength of providing solution for the present crisis prevailing in the world. Islam is the system of life revealed by the Creator and Lord of man, and only this system has the strength to rise above the sensibilities of temporal and personal interests and guarantee the welfare of all people. The Jamaat appeals to the entire world and the protestors of Wall Street to consider the teachings of Islam with utmost sincerity.
On this occasion the Jamaat also draws the attention of the policymakers of our country to learn a lesson from these happenings. Our country, too, has decided to tread this devastating path in the field of economic policymaking, and is going ahead thereon. The policies, which have brought the prosperous countries of America and Europe down to the ground, are more so devastating for a poor country like India. The need is that our country stays away from capitalistic imperialistic policies.

5. Situation in Arab World:
The public awakening in the countries in Arab world is pleasant from different angles. Launching a peaceful movement against monarchy and autocracy, the public in Tunisia and Egypt dethroned the despotic rulers and now the way for democratic governments there has been paved. Its possibilities are bright in Yemen as well.
With the success of Ikhwan al-Muslimoon’s political party Al-Ahrar wal A’dalah (Freedom and Justice Party) in Egypt and Al-Nahdha in Tunisia, it is hoped that the process of governance based on pristine values of Islam will be functional in these two Muslim countries, and would prove torch-bearer for other Muslim countries as well. Further, it will remove the misapprehensions in the minds of the common people in the world created as a result of the baseless propaganda unleashed against Islam and the Muslim Ummah by the Western world, especially America.
This session of CAC of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind looks at this healthy change in Muslim countries with hope and honour. Movements of the same stature had been launched in Libya and Syria but due to western interference in both the countries the situation there got worsened. Western interference turned the peaceful movement in Libya into a violent one, as a result of which very unpleasant happenings occurred there, and now after the ouster of Col. Muammar Ghaddafi a situation of conflict and clash between Islam-loving sections and western elements has been prevailing over there. Likewise, due to oppressive attitude of Syrian rulers and the western agenda the citizens of that country have been undergoing trials and tribulations. Human lives are being lost in large numbers over there. Jamaat-e-Islami Hind severely condemns western interference in those countries, and appeals to the peace-loving and pro-democracy people of the world to raise their voice against the undue interference of the west in Middle East and North Africa, especially Libya and Syria. This session of the CAC also demands from the Government of India to try to keep America and NATO from Libya and Syria by exerting its own influence and diplomatic sources.

2679 - Israel’s Biometric Database Deemed “Harmful” by High Court Justices


JULY 27, 2012 | BY REBECCA BOWE


In Israel, a heated debate is underway about whether Israel’s Interior Ministry will move ahead with the creation of a governmental biometric database containing digital fingerprints and facial photographs, which would be linked to “smart” national ID cards containing microchips. At the heart of the issue is a major concern about privacy: Aggregated personal information invites security breaches, and large databases of biometric information can be honeypots of sensitive data vulnerable to exploitation.

On July 23, Israel’s High Court of Justice held a hearing on a petition filed by civil rights advocates who sought to strike down a law establishing a governmental biometric database and an associated two-year pilot program. The law approving the database, enacted in 2009, met with public resistance until the government backed down and agreed to begin with only the pilot program. The pilot was supposed to be a test for determining whether it was actually necessary to move forward with building the biometric database, but an Interior Ministry decree that sanctioned the program did not actually contain any criteria to measure whether the program succeeded or failed.

While three justices voiced harsh criticism of the database, they didn’t move to cancel the project altogether. Instead, they determined that the pilot program description has to present clear criteria for success and failure, so that it would be conducted as a true test. The ruling requires the Interior Ministry to examine the very necessity of a central database, and to seriously weigh possible alternatives. The court also called for an independent review of the program, and preserved petitioners’ right to return and present their claims against the database and pilot program.

In the course of the hearing, several justices characterized the proposed database as a “harmful” and “extreme” measure. They have good reason to be skittish: Last fall, officials discovered that information in Israel’s primary population database had been hacked in 2006, and the personal records of some 9 million Israelis—both living and dead—were uploaded to the Internet and made freely available. The database contained substantial information including full names, identity numbers, addresses, dates of birth and death, immigration dates and familial relationships. Given this blemished track record, there is naturally a concern that a database that also contained biometric information would meet the same fate.

“Every once in a while, we find the census in .torrent files all over the web,” noted Jonathan Klinger, an attorney who teamed up with Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) lawyer Avner Pinchuk in opposing the biometric database. The petitioners included ACRI, the Movement for Digital Rights, Professor Karin Nahon of the University of Washington and Hebrew University, and Doron Ofek, an information security expert.

“The State in fact accepted the position of the petitioners and the Justices, according to which the order establishing the biometric database is illegal and does not enable an examination of the database’s necessity,” noted Pinchuk, the ACRI attorney. “The Interior Ministry’s intention to establish a database even before this essential flaw is amended demonstrates the hastiness and aggression that have characterized this dangerous project since its inception.”
Israel's biometric database is just one of several massive governmental identification programs moving forward at the global level. India is still working toward creating the world’s largest database of irises, fingerprints and facial photos, while Argentina is building a nationwide biometric database of it own. As more of these identity schemes crop up across the world, serious critical examination of these systems is urgently needed.