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 30, 2017

11931 - ADRIFT WITHOUT THE AADHAAR CARD - Pune Mirror



By Gouri Dange, Pune Mirror | Updated: Aug 29, 2017, 02.30 AM IST

Those who came in late are sentenced to being Niraadhaar

Those of us who were in on the early stampede for the Aadhaar card and got this tremendous sense of personal and national achievement once it came into our anxious, waiting hands, we must consider ourselves lucky. I’ve been watching just one young Indian national and her two kids struggling to get one, and it would have been a funny story if it wasn’t so aggravating.

And this is not about the fundamental questions and faults of the scheme itself. There are many cogent and uncomfortable questionings of the whole UIDAI and its Aadhaar scheme by many well-qualified-to-speak people, and there have been no satisfactory answers.

What we are talking about here, however, is a citizen who accepts that she needs to get herself and her kids the A-card, and is trying systematically to go about doing just that. She has just returned from a long stint in an African country, and is re-rooting back in India. It was not possible to get the whole thing going when she came here on brief vacations.

Some of us ‘lucky’ ones got to do our own running around and deciphering right at the very beginning. Some building societies were organised enough to get a person with the Aadhaar machine right at their doorstep, dedicated to just the residents of the place. But now, the random and lone citizens stumbling about to get the coveted card in place, have a deliciously absurd time.

Here’s just one case, of a young educated woman with a new job and two small kids. Over the last two months, in pursuit of the Aadhaar card, she has gone online, made calls, taken unpaid leave from a new job, planted her kids on someone so that she can go on this wild goose chase, and always come away unattended. The big card centre near her home in Bavdhan is closed indefinitely; there are people in there, very polite, but with no particular explanation why their centre has gone dead. They kindly point her to the Fergusson College Road centre, where she comes out with a similar no-go experience. These people point her to the Law College Road one, who cannot do it (note, that all of this takes half a working day easily in just the coming going and collection of ‘no’. The Laxmi Road centre, she is told, has closed down. And agent somewhere near Poona College tells her that his system is down and there is no saying when it will be up and running again. Same thing with a centre in Kothrud — non-operational indefinitely, she was told, once she reached there.

She then calls up a nagar sevak type, who asks her to come to his office and take his visiting card and present it to the Balewadi Aadhaar Centre. He gives her a phone number and is told that she must call beforehand, as there is a waiting list for the waiting list at the Balewadi centre. She does this, and is told by Balewadi to come on a Thursday at 4.30 pm. A proper appointment. Ah, light at the end of the tunnel. Another half-day without pay, and off she goes, after making arrangements for the kids to be looked after. Only to be told at Balewadi (after being given that appointment hardly five days earlier) that their “service provider didn’t file IT returns so all applications made from his centre are getting rejected”. Huh? Is all that she could manage to say, and return home with a new lead: Aundgaon jao, madam. Nakki milel. Monday la.

(Now all these troubles seem like nothing compared to recent events at Chandigarh and Panchkula, and maybe we should stop cribbing and daily go down on our knees and give thanks that we have the opportunity to run from pillar to post chasing the Holy Grail without being molested, murdered, marauded or manhandled. Always, for us in this new India, the cold comfort of being better off than someone and someplace else.)

One of the things perhaps she could do, after Aadhaar from Aundhgaon turns out to be a non-operational project, is do her homework on which city or state has its act slightly together, and take a non-paid vacation (as opposed to single-day leaves without pay) and apply for the card in such a place, if it exists? Or would that be yet another exercise in futility, one wonders.

If an educated woman with the ability to take herself hither and yon (albeit at some cost) is given such a run around, we can imagine what the less fortunate must be dealing with. Time to sing that line from the famous Asha Bhonsle Marathi song Jivalagaa: “Niraadhar mi, mi vanavaasi”. (I am without support, and shut out in the cold.)