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 26, 2010

137 - India in Transition by Sudhir Krishnaswamy

India in Transition
Unique Identity Numbers: The Enabler of Policy Reform
Sudhir Krishnaswamy
02/01/2010

The creation of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) and the appointment of Mr. Nandan Nilekani (former CEO of Infosys) as its Chairperson, have generated a great deal of excitement around the Unique Identity Numbers (UIN) project. The Authority’s commitment to produce the first batch of UINs within a period of two years has prompted a celebratory round of applause in the media. It would certainly be a significant technological and logistical feat to meet this self imposed target. However, the UIDAI runs the risk of meeting the target but failing to create a UIN which will serve as a platform for a revolution in public service delivery or the radical overhaul of internal security. In order to achieve these substantive outcomes, the UIDAI must identify the key constitutional, legal, and institutional policy challenges and then resolve them in a democratic and participatory fashion, as the economic and political costs of correcting or redesigning the key parameters of the project may be so high that a mid-course correction may well be ruled out. Hence, the UIDAI has a critical window of opportunity to engage and resolve these interconnected policy questions at the outset. Three such issues demand serious attention: institutional design, privacy, and citizenship. A UIN project that fails to respond to these issues substantively will inevitably fail to bring revolutionary change to governmental process.

I begin with a consideration of the institutional location of the UIN project. The UIDAI is an executive authority created by Executive Orders which functions as an independent agency under the auspices of the Planning Commission of India. It is noteworthy that the Planning Commission is itself constituted by a Cabinet Resolution and does not have a constitutional or statutory status. However, it is inadvisable to vest arguably the most important database of Indian residents in a body that does not have a determinate legal status. UIDAI will be responsible for the creation and maintenance, and possibly the utilization of the database, and hence it is critical that its legal rights and obligations be spelled out in careful details. The guardian of the UIN database cannot exist in a legal grey zone.

A preliminary issue that all national ID systems have to contend with is whether the ID card or number is mandatory or voluntary. The Chairperson of UIDAI has announced that the Indian system will be voluntary. By allowing residents to elect to have such an ID number or not, the UIDAI substantially respects a central tenet of privacy law: that information should be accessed with the consent of the information giver. However, for this consent to be meaningful, the information subject should have full information about the uses for which the information is being given. In other words, the functions and potential users of the UIN must be determined in advance and be available to information subjects before they give up information. While ensuring that control over access to personal data is a useful tool to protect citizen autonomy, we must go further to allow the information subject control over the use of the information: when, where, and how it is used. Hence, at each point of use, the information subject should be requested to furnish consent and some key information without which the UIN cannot be accessed by any person or agency. Without these protections the voluntary character of the UIN is illusory. When one considers that the UIDAI hopes to ensure that the UIN is indispensable to access basic services, then voluntary subscription alone does not adequately protect information subject autonomy.

A related issue that impinges on the privacy of information subjects is the quantum and quality of data that UIDAI will collect and organize as well the identifier chosen as the UIN. The data collected in order to grant a UIN may be linked to the purpose of the identity verification or linked intrinsically to the person. The UIDAI has indicated that they will utilize data intrinsic to the person, including biometric data. Further, personal data including the name, date of birth, place of residence, and community identity, among others may potentially be linked to the biometric data to create unique identity. This range of data may be thought necessary for the number of functions that the UIN has been proposed to serve.

However, the choice of the quantum or nature of information sought to be collected and the institutional guardianship of this data is critical to evaluate the potential impact on the privacy of the information subjects. Any proposal to collect this range of personal information and to integrate it into a single database and allow a single institution to utilize this data raises the serious prospect of a surveillance state. As a general rule, it may be proposed that as little correlated data as possible must be made available to a single institution or agency. In the event that it is thought expedient to collect all this personal information, then it is essential that this be vested in different databases, maintained by different institutions with rigorous institutional protocols of access of sharing that follows legal due process. Barring these institutional and process protections the UIN database will violate the rights of privacy which are integral to the right to life in Article 21 of the constitution. The absence of statutory protection for a privacy right does not give sanction to the UIN project. It only elevates the nature of the legal challenge to such a database from the realms of administrative law to one of a constitutional character.

The choice of identifier to be used as a UIN is critical to maintain the anonymity and privacy of the citizen subjects. As the UIDAI has indicated that it will use a random rather than systematic identifier, this will avoid the worst excesses that may result from easy traceability. The Rwandan genocide and the Gujarat riots used ID cards and voter lists respectively as the bureaucratic aids through which collective violence was organized. As any student of politics and constitutional law learns, it is insufficient to rely on the good intentions of those in power to ensure that the UIN is not put to such use. The UIN database and its custodian must be ring fenced from ever being able to put to such heinous purposes.

For the UIN to be the governmental process reform enabler that it is designed to be, there needs to be an active interface between the UIN and other legal markers of status and identity. The primary legal marker that the UIN will need to integrate is that of citizenship. However, there is confusion about whether the UIN will be available only to citizens or to all residents. The early announcements by the UIDAI suggest that it will not address the difficult problems that relate to the determination of citizenship. The earlier efforts of the Home Ministry through the pilot projects of the Multi Purpose National Identity Cards project led to the introduction of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003 under Section 18 of the Citizenship Act, 1955. These rules seek to bring clarity to the process of issuing ID cards on the basis of citizenship.

The reluctance of the UIDAI to trespass into the territory of the Home Ministry to resolve the messy state of the law relating to citizenship is understandable. The history of the disputes relating to citizenship and domicile status is evidence of the difficult legal and political problems that need to be resolved in this sphere of public policy. However, the delivery of public services to the poor is inevitably tied up with the determination of the particular legal status of the claimant to the entitlement or benefit. This legal status may be citizenship, residence, income levels, caste or religious background. Further, the social unit which is entitled under each scheme may be the individual, family, household or community. Any improvement in delivery of public services is conditional on the official determination that the legal entitlement or benefit is properly claimed. Hence, the UIDAI will need to resolve difficult problems, not avoid them in order to be bring reform to public service delivery. If not, the UIN will play no significant role in public service delivery reform.

In the next twenty-four months, the UIDAI may well succeed in issuing the first UINs. However, unless the UINs are statutory legal entitlements of all eligible residents or citizens, it may well become burdensome to acquire, and therefore another opportunity for rent seeking government or government authorized operators. Moreover, for the UIN to be an enabler of social reform through improved service delivery and through intelligent law enforcement, it will need to critically analyze and overhaul the dysfunctional legal framework in the fields of privacy and the legal status of claimant. We can have a UIN that does not tackle any of these policy muddles, but that will not be the game-changing initiative it promises to be.

Sudhir Krishnaswamy is Professor of Law at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, and the author of Democracy and Constitutionalism in India: A Study of the Basic Structure Doctrine (Oxford University Press 2009).
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