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, June 1, 2010

176 - A grass-roots challenge to the UID project

A grass-roots challenge to the UID project

Awareness is the first challenge the ambitious programme has encountered at the grass-roots level and while it will encounter more challenges, this is something the UIDAI, which oversees Aadhaar, needs to address quickly as it increases the scale and scope of its effort

Karen Leigh



Kibbanahalli, Karnataka: One humid day in May, in a small building off the main road, Manjola, a farm worker, sat at a small wooden table, pressing her fingers, one at a time on an electronic pad that scanned and stored her prints.
She is among the first Indians to be enrolled in the unique identity programme (UID), or Aadhaar, which seeks to provide at least 600 million residents with a universal government identity by 2011.
The only problem is that Manjola knows nothing about the programme in which she is being registered.
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Awareness is the first challenge the ambitious programme has encountered at the grass-roots level and while it will encounter more challenges, this is something the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which oversees Aadhaar, needs to address quickly as it increases the scale and scope of its effort.
Manjola hadn’t heard of Aadhaar or UIDAI.
“No one has told me anything about it. I don’t know who’s in charge of it,” she said, leaning forward in her chair as her retinas are scanned, the second and final step in the biometric data gathering process. “My children’s school teacher told me there was a programme to give my children an ID, so I came because I knew that would be good for them.”
Pilot project: A Kibbanahalli resident (top) gets her photo taken for enrolling in Aadhaar; a biometric device is used to scan fingerprints. Most villagers have limited knowledge about the programme’s benefits. Hemant Mishra/Mint
Pilot project: A Kibbanahalli resident (top) gets her photo taken for enrolling in Aadhaar; a biometric device is used to scan fingerprints. Most villagers have limited knowledge about the programme’s benefits. Hemant Mishra/Mint
Aadhaar met its initial target in this part of Karnataka; at least 2,200 residents of Kibbanahalli—and 25,000 in the Tumkur district—registered for the 12-digit Aadhaar numbers in a “proof of concept” study, a test ahead of the programme’s national roll-out, from August through next February.
Similar tests were carried out in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
The month-long Tumkur project, which concluded on Thursday, showed two or three clerical mistakes per 100 registrants.
“There will be mistakes because it’s early on,” said Raju S.K., a teacher who participated in both rounds of the test. “My name was written wrong; a wrong initial.”
But the larger issue, if Tumkur is any indication, is awareness, especially among the rural poor whom UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani has said will be the programme’s biggest beneficiaries.
The UIDAI’s communication and awareness team plans a large-scale education push for the weeks leading up to the test’s start in August.
But with limited trained personnel on the ground, it could be an uphill battle.
Vijay Mahajan, chairman of Hyderabad-based Basix, which works to promote microfinance innovation in rural areas, said that in the absence of a structured education programme, word of mouth among rural residents would be crucial.
“The first few million people who get a UID will end up educating their neighbours, and slowly it will spread,” he said. “They won’t know it conceptually, or just because they enrolled. They’ll know about it after they’ve had some experience using it.”
In Kibbanahalli, the only visible sign of Aadhaar’s presence was one UIDAI sign, set far back from the road at the door to an enrolment site.
At another centre where data was being collected, there was no signage and no lighting. Several residents waiting in line to have their biometrics recorded said they didn’t know what a unique identity was and had never heard of Nilekani or the project.
During the early stages, turnout was so thin in Kibbanahalli that local officials began doing everything in their power to draw in registrants.
Adarsha S.S., a programme supervisor in Tumkur, said this included the practice of telling residents to bring their government-issued ration cards to one of the Aadhaar enrolment sites, without first telling them that once there, their fingerprints and retinas would be scanned for a UID.
“People came on a small scale before, during the first round,” he said. “Then we told them to bring their ration cards, and they began coming more.”
Nanja Muri, the village accountant in Kibbanahalli, highlighted the dearth of manpower in rural areas.
He said that only district revenue inspectors—in Tumkur, he added, there is only one overseeing 48 villages—had been sufficiently trained by government officials to educate residents, and that village accountants in the district had taken it upon themselves to spread the word among residents.
Muri’s own grass-roots effort included a small musical band that walked the streets, drawing people out of their homes to explain the fundamentals of UID and provide them with application forms.
Kathye Yini, a local housewife who had just been registered for a unique identity, said she had learned of the programme through Muri, who knocked on her door one night.
She added that it was her neighbours—and not government officials—who were responsible for her limited knowledge of the programme’s benefits.
When asked about the impact a UID would have on her life, she only knew that, unlike the ration and voter ID cards she currently possessed, a UID would give her proof of address if she travelled outside Karnataka.
UIDAI officials are not surprised about the initial responses.
“It’s a slim organization compared to the width and breadth of India,” said K.K. Sharma, assistant director general of UIDAI’s regional office in Bangalore. “We were expecting teething mistakes.”
He said that by August, fewer than 30 UIDAI staffers would be working in the regional headquarters in Bangalore, overseeing three states, two Union territories and at least 150 million residents.
Sharma declined comment on the issue of lack of publicity.
However, an official, who did not want to be named, said that the proof of concept was only meant to be a technical test of the biometric machines and overall enrolment process, and not meant to be about explaining the programme to people. In the next month, UIDAI’s awareness council will be submitting its report on the communication strategies it should employ to increase awareness among rural residents.
Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, who has opposed the programme as well as the government’s decision to have Nilekani head it, said it was troubling that residents did not comprehend why they were providing their personal information.
Basix’s Mahajan said that given the advantages the programme would eventually bestow on them, people would learn, though it would be of their own accord.
“When the first woman to be registered for a UID in a village sticks her finger on a biometric device and is able to access banking with it, she’ll get excited and will tell her friends,” he said. “And thus UID will spread.”
karen.l@livemint.com