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, May 24, 2017

11461 - Linking PAN to Aadhaar Cards: Who am I? - TNN

May 22, 2017, 7:26 PM IST V Raghunathan in Outraged | India | TOI

It was an innocuous news at first. Little did one know what the pronouncement held in store for a common man, especially if one turned out to be a south-Indian in general, and a Tamilian in particular. Yes, I am referring to the pronouncement that from this year on, the PAN Card and Aadhaar Card had to be linked. Now I can say I am a proud Indian, with all my cards in place: My PAN Card, My Aadhaar Card, My election Card, my Passport, my driving licence, my gas-card, my electricity bill, my bank account details, my matriculation certificate – you name it and I can produce it. Most of them have my antecedents: my name, my late father’s name, my address, my date of birth, et al. So pardon my naiveté if I thought this linking of Aadhaar with PAN was going to be a picnic.

TOI photo)
Expectedly, it has been anything but. It would be a reasonable postulate that the living addresses one provides for any of these documents would be of the dwelling one held at the time of applying for or becoming entitled to the document concerned. After all, even the Government of India or its Income Tax Department, in their infinite wisdom, will not hypothesize that the address once given is unchangeable, or that their clerks are beyond committing errors. Besides, for a variety of purposes one’s existential proof, be it one’s address or ration card or whatever, keep getting confirmed and reconfirmed time and again by one or the other government agency, putting the already hard-pressed constabulary to even more work. So where is the rub?
It is not my fault that I was named Raghunathan and it is not my fault that down South, among Tamilians, it is the sociological norm to put the initial of the father’s name as one’s own initial. My late father was A.M. Viswanathan. So my name, throughout my schooling, my matriculation, my college, and eventually in most official documents remained V. Raghunathan. It never struck me that some clerks ahd revised my name as V Raghunathan (without the dot). After all when you live in India, you can hardly afford to be fussy about whether all the I’s are dotted and all the T’s are crossed. You simply learn to count your blessings that you got added identity to your existence, name misspelt or not. Foolish would be the soul that sends a card back to the authorities because some fatuous clerk did not insert a space or a dot in a name.
Those were non-computerized times and the world was a simpler place. My name appeared variously as V. Raghunathan (with the dot in My matriculation Certificate, my Driving Licence, my bank accounts etc.), V Raghunathan (without the dot but with a space, in the current Adhar Card, a BOD Card, etc.) or VRaghunathan (without a space or a dot, as in my PAN Card), depending on the legal requirements, technological constraints (cannot accept a dot in a name; first name cannot be a single digit like V, etc.) or diligence or lack of it of the clerks concerned.
Life went on good and smooth until I hit that point in my life, some four decades ago, when I needed a passport. When I tried to put my usual name in the application form, I was peremptorily required to expand the initial. So my name had to be put down as Viswanathan Raghunathan. So I had another variant added to the plethora of alternatives already existing. Ergo, that’s how I came to be known as in my passport and hence in international air-tickets; and many have been the times when I missed an announcement meant for me because the public address system was hollering for a Mr. R. Viswanathan, because they quite reasonably thought Viswanathan which appeared first was my first name, when my name was…well you know it! Once, I was told I had no reservation on an international flight, because when I gave my name as Raghunathan, the lady at the check-in desk was in fact looking at Viswanathan R. But I fought these little battles gallantly and did not cave in from the challenges of living in my good country.
Only now, when my Chartered Accountant called me to link my Pan Card to my Adhar Card that new revelations came my way. I was told that my name in the PAN Card was VRaghunathan (without a space between V and R) while the name in the Adahar Card was Viswanathan Raghunathan (because they wanted the name as it appeared in the passport). Hence the two would not link! I had to change the name in one of the two documents to match the other! Since the name on the Adhar card was more easily changeable online, I had the name in the Adhar Card changed to V Raghunathan. I thought my travails were over, when my Chartered Accountant brought the absence of space between V and R in the PAN Card to my notice, while in the Adhar Card it appeared with the due space. But since I did not wish to put an incorrect name, VRaghuanthan, on my Adhar Card, I set upon changing it on my PAN Card. It should be a straight forward job, you would think. Right? Of course, you would be wrong.
This had to be handled through a certain Integrated India Data Solutions, who were expected to find solution to my problem. When I asked for putting a space between V and R – a simple enough request – I was told that the name of my father in the PAN Card was AMViswanathan (no fault of mine, mind you) and the address given was obviously not my current one, having moved quite a few times since my PAN Card was created. OK, So I should be able to ask for a simple correction of the name and seek change of address, with a suitable address proof, right? Wrong again.
The address proof that I furnish must have my name as V Raghunathan (and not as V. Raghunathan) and my father’s name must appear in that document as AMViswanathan, and not A.M. Viswanathan, his correct name. That’s not all either. I must also furnish proof that the V in my name corresponds to Viswanathan and that Viswanathan is indeed my father! How do I prove it? I was advised to get a Gazetted Officer testify to that effect. But how do I prove it to the Gazetted Officer that the V and Viswanathan are the same souls and are indeed my father, when my good father left for his heavenly abode nearly four decades ago? “We don’t know sir, but those are the rules!”
And believe me, I have not even shared with you the trauma that I have suffered over the years when some worthies chose to ‘correct’ my father’s name by inserting an ‘H’ in the Vishwa, instead of the Tamilian “Viswa”…

I would mind none of it, had at least a small fraction of the tax money paid by me over several decades worked a wee bit in my favour. But as I inch close to my retirement, what I have got from the Government of I is a serious identity crisis. Who am I? V. Raghunathan, V Raghunathan or VRaghunathan or Viswanathan Raghunathan? Who is my father? A.M. Viswanathan, A M Viswanathan AMViswanathan or A M Vishwanathan? My head is in a spin.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.