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

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

12025 - The ‘Pey’ and ‘Bhutam’ in India’s Technology-Fuelled Development Crusade - The Wire




To evaluate the role data plays, we need to understand if data in its modern avatar is more akin to being pey, a vampire-like evil spirit, or bhutham, a friendly ghost.

It is critical to understand and evaluate the role it plays, both for us as individual users, and in terms of institutions using our data to govern, regulate, and control. Credit: Reuters

In an article published last year in the journal History of Political Thought, Matthew Baxter examines the nuances of the first but incomplete Tamil translation of The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. Periyar, the pioneer of the Self-Respect Movement, published it in a serialised form in 1931. Periyar had written the introduction for this version that expanded the Marxist credo into a wider struggle for equality – not only against class but also against caste oppression. It was hence called Samadharma (equal dharma) Manifesto.  The choice for an appropriate Tamil word for “spectre” found in the famous opening lines of the book is crucial. Pey and bhutham were candidate Tamil words. Pey meant a vampire-like evil spirit while bhutham was a friendly ghost. Referring to an 18th century Protestant missionary in India, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg, who noted the divisions of supernaturals in Tamil, Baxter writes that “such Bhuta[m]s were created for the service of gods and other persons. Even though they have to do the most tedious jobs, [South Indians] do not consider them to be an affliction because they were not created for anything other than their jobs. Hence, one could not compare them to the wretched state of peys.”

The cultural-historical context meant that pey was pejorative while bhutham had a positive, transformative connotation.  Consequently, the “spectre of communism” was translated as “bhutham of samadharma” in the first translation.

The pey-bhutham duality can be used as an effective lens to look at how Indian democracy is being fashioned in the age of data deluge. Various agencies, both private and public, are accessing our data, guiding our preferences, and also controlling our actions on many occasions. It is virtually impossible today to remain agnostic about the role of data in our lives. It is thus ever more critical to understand and evaluate the role it plays, both for us as individual users, and in terms of institutions using our data to govern, regulate, and control. It is in this context that we need to understand, in Periyar’s framing, if data in its modern avatar is more akin to being pey or bhutham.

The overdrive of the current coercive government to make Aadhaar mandatory has the horrific possibility of infringing on personal liberty and dignity mediated through seemingly “consensual” disclosure of data.

In other words, the potential of data playing the role of pey. The recent judgment on the ‘Right to Privacy’ (RTP) by the Supreme Court is remarkable in its import. It reinforces that not all citizens are criminals and upholds the ethic of jurisprudence of “innocent until proven guilty”. It substantiates that in a genuine democracy there is no a priori reason for the state to monitor its citizens through mandatory data contraptions like Aadhaar. It is astonishing that Ravi Shankar Prasad, a Bharatiya Janata Party minister, made a U-turn after the Supreme Court verdict that the central government always wanted to uphold the RTP. If his post-verdict comments are true, why was there a court case? While upholding the RTP is non-negotiable, we must start charting the contours of its relationship with Right to Information(RTI) Act     through which data is a potential  bhutham.

RTI has been a big feather in the cap of transparency. While there is still a long way to go, it has been a powerful instrument in creating a substrate for participatory democracy. We must remember that the government is elected for the people and not the other way around and that comes with a basic set of behavioural norms for the state. It would be disastrous to conflate individual liberties, enshrined in the constitution and RTP, with the state’s mandatory disclosure of information through Section 4 of the RTI. It is thus imperative that we as citizens continue to monitor the state and its actions and ensure that the state doesn’t end up annihilating or curbing  transparency   as any kind of bargain for the RTP.

It brings me to another point of how data, in its pey form, can hide facts. As an example of harnessing transparency, recently in a study, using publicly available data, we were able to highlight the true extent of delays in wage payments in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). By analysing over nine million transactions across ten states, we assessed that the true payable penalty by the government to the workers for payment delays for one financial year alone was around Rs 1200 crores. Whereas, the reported amount of penalty for payment delays by the government was only Rs 519 crores. The under-reporting of penalty is a faulty, definitional sleight of hand, by the state in the NREGA Management Information System (MIS). The MIS assumes that the date of electronic invoice generation of wages in the individual states is the date on which wages are paid to the labourers. It doesn’t account for the delay in transferring wages from the Centre to the states. The Centre has thus completely abdicated responsibility for delays in funds release to the states.
This analysis was possible solely due to availability of transaction-level details in the NREGA MIS. Data, looked at this way, assumes the form of bhutham. The study will, we hope, assist the government to rectify its “mistake” and make computer systems reflect the truth. Addressing this problem to adhere to the Act is more a question of political willingness than a mere technical fix. True spirit of transparency dictates that information needs to collated and presented in a manner not so much to obfuscate facts but to increase agency and participation of the most marginalised. In NREGA alone, there are numerous examples of casting the role of data in the pey-bhutham framework.

As another example, not so long ago, I had a long conversation with an Adivasi woman, Anita Devi (name changed), in a village in Palamu district, Jharkhand. Anita Devi is not literate in the popular usage of the term. After discussing a range of topics from the functioning of NREGA to pensions and statistics to local governance, I deliberately posed a rather complicated question: “Can a machine learn democracy?”. She responded with casual elegance, saying “A computer doesn’t have a mind of its own. A computer is after all made and run by humans. If we truly want it to imbibe principles of democracy then we can teach it, isn’t it?”

This comment from the ground would likely make Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig chuckle, echoing as it does his motto “code is law”. Devi’s deep, insightful response speaks volumes about the need for compassionate information systems design to enable participatory democracy.

Transparency and accountability of the state and privacy of individuals are key pillars of a just society. We have to be mindful that none of these pillars are sacrificed at the cost of the other. As Anita Devi eloquently stated, to sustain constitutional ideals, we must incorporate democratic principles in the design and implementation of information  technology,  lest it become a tool of surveillance or exclusion. In this regard, much like Periyar’s coinage, data and its modern day twin, information technology, need to be well thought-out. A non-enactment of RTP may have turned data into pey and the essence of RTI has made data closer to bhuthamI say  closer because there is still some distance to be covered for proactive disclosure of information to be  genuinely implemented.     There is much work to be done in designing and presenting public data from a bottom-up “user-friendly” perspective as opposed to a top-down “management” friendly perspective. In a hazardously unequal society like India, data can be a powerful friend if leveraged creatively for a more humane and equitable society. We need to rethink information structuring not just as MIS but as Janata Information Systems (JIS) to truly reconcile data being a bhutham.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.