1564 - As Bright As Night, or, How Nandan Nilekani Blindsided A Nation with Aadhaar By Ram Krishnaswamy & Vickram Crishna

As Bright As Night, or, How Nandan Nilekani Blindsided A Nation with Aadhaar

By Ram Krishnaswamy & Vickram Crishna

On many occasions, after my graduation,  riding the city roads in Chennai on my Royal Enfield Bullet, I would be forced off the road, or have to stop by the roadside for my safety, when the car coming in the opposite direction, most often an Ambassador, would be driving with the high beam on. By the rule of law, high beam headlights are not to be used on roads well lit by street lamps, but who cares for traffic rules in India?

The high beam was often used by drivers to spot potholes early enough to avoid them; a reasonable enough justification for preserving the car's condition, but an action that directly jeopardised the lives of other people, especially those riding two wheelers, bicycles and motorbikes.

Full beam headlights are blinding, and as such, one has no option but to yield right of way, no matter what the actual scenario, right or wrong.

The Indian government is now busy producing an ersatz Ambassador – not the car, but a cloned and compromised vehicle for the most egregious intrusion into personal privacy and information the world has ever seen.

The Prime Minister, Mr Manmohan Singh, appointed Nandan Nilekani as Chairman of the Unique Identity Authority of India, an arm of the Planning Commission. He was given the responsibility of issuing numbers to every living human being in India.

Why this man?

The following list is easily found, in Wikipedia:

·      One of the youngest entrepreneurs to join 20 global leaders on the prestigious World Economic Forum (WEF) Foundation Board in January 2006.

·      Member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi

·      Member of the review committee of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

·      Forbes “Businessman of the Year” for Asia in 2007.

·      He, along with Infosys founder (and currently non-executive chairman) N. R. Narayana Murthy, also received Fortune magazine’s ‘Asia’s Businessmen of the Year 2003’ award.

·      Named among the ‘World’s most respected business leaders’ in 2002 and 2003, according to a global survey by Financial Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

·      Awarded the Corporate Citizen of the Year award at the Asia Business Leader Awards (2004) organized by CNBC.

• Joseph Schumpeter Prize for innovative services in economy, economic sciences and politics - 2005.[11]
• Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian honors awarded by the Government of India - 2006.
• Was presented the 'Legend in Leadership Award' by the Yale University in November 2009. He is the first Indian to receive the top honour.
• First Indian to be honoured with the Legend in Leadership Award of Yale University.
• Annual global ''ID People Awards'',
• Was awarded the 12th Sir M Visvesvaraya Memorial Award on Founder's Day, organised by the Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FKCCI), to mark the birth anniversary of Sir M Visvesvaraya.

This list may not be fully comprehensive, but it certainly implies that this person is, indeed, a luminaire extraordinaire – literally, a very bright light.

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, you just step aside, no matter if the driver is driving on the wrong side of the road, or driving the wrong way down a one way road.

This is the story of Aadhaar. Nandan's light is so bright, that the entire nation has gone silent, unquestioningly accepting that this project must be right for the country.

There are about 1,75,000 IIT alumni worldwide, all willing to accept Aadhaar without question, bar a handful labelled as activists for simply asking questions; only because Nandan is also an IIT alumnus.

As a comment to an article in Money Life by Dr.Samir Kelekar, an IIT Bombay alumnus, titled “UIDAI chairman leaves simple questions unanswered at lecture for students”, Sudhir Badami, another IIT alumnus, in reply to Vickram’s comment, wrote, “Thanks, Vickram, for an elaborate response. I go with confidence in Nandan's ability in delivering things and shall I say Integrity. Yes, I do need to go into details. Perhaps in a real world outside the commercial arena, he is somewhat naive. Instead of getting him on the defensive, I think he could do well with constructive criticism. I will get back on this later.”

It has been an uphill task to even raise questions of the legality or constitutionality of Aadhaar, and the privacy issues associated with a centralised identity database and its accessibility, only because everyone blindly accepts that Nandan is very capable and knows what he is doing.

We have questioned many family and friends living in India on what they know about Aadhaar, and we are disappointed to hear responses such as, “I think it is some kind of ID card for the poor”, and, “Don’t know much, except that Manmohan Singh has asked Nandan Nilekani to issue 600 million people with a number”; and so on. Mind you, these are highly educated professionals, surgeons, lawyers, bankers, sociologists, businessmen, engineers (including other IITians) etc.

What will Aadhaar be, without Nandan Nilekani as the Head (or should that be headlight?), is the question. Will it be another rattler of an Ambassador car, like many other government-run schemes, like the PDS and NREGS?

And imagine either Raja or Suresh Kalmadi as the UIDAI Chief! Tongues would wag, and the media would be in a frenzy, questioning every single move made.

Now, do we ever say the car has got powerful headlights, so it must be a good car?

In evaluating Aadhaar, the general public and the intelligentsia should detach Nandan Nilekani from Aadhaar. Put some other driver in his seat, and now see how good the car looks.

When the authors published their articles in Money Life, “Numbers Game, Part I & II”, and shared it with Mr Narayana Murthy (another IIT alumnus, and former chairman of Infosys, succeeded by Nandan Nilekani), he replied thus: “Dear Ram, Thanks for your kind mail. You do make some serious points. Let me think about them.”

This is all we ask the nation. Forget for a moment that Nandan Nilekani is the UIDAI Chief, evaluate Aadhaar with an open mind, and see if this is what India needs.

ID Cards have been rejected in UK, USA and Australia, not by the governments, but by the people, who dumped both politicians and the political parties who were pushing Identity Cards, such as the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

President George W Bush, and the Labour Party British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Where are they now? And what happened to the ID cards they were pushing with such enthusiasm?

To counter this, Nandan talks about Chile and China, in his article, Power of Identity - Inclusion. For people not in the know, Chile and China are both countries that have in the past, and continue till today, to violate human rights.

Even as I pen this article, I see the headlines “Obama to take on China on human rights?” Should India ape China’s human right violation, or should India suppress and torture its population, like Gen Pinochet did in Chile ?

“In a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity - collective or individual, ascribed or constructed - becomes the fundamental source of social meaning,” says Nandan Nilekani, (Power of Identity).

Give us a break, Nandan. The rhetoric sounds brilliant. However, we are concerned that Aadhaar, the identity that you are force-feeding the illiterate masses in India, could become the fundamental source of social stigma and discrimination.

You may find this difficult to understand, considering your wealthy lifestyle in gated communities, and your lengthy stay abroad, in New York. Please redo your homework, and even walk away from this Frankenstein, Aadhaar, as it could destroy all that you have achieved in over three decades.

As with anything, we human beings get conditioned, and people are now capable of seeing, despite the high beam. We notice that the media that blindly echoed the UID/Aadhaar drum beat, orchestrated by UIDAI marketing and UIDAI-fed advertising agencies, are now raising unpalatable and probing questions.

Is UID, or Aadhaar, only a number, Nandan, as you keep repeating?

We do not believe so, as we have held Aadhaar cards – yes, ID Cards! - issued to our friends, in our hands. At least, if they were standard credit card sized plastic cards, designed to fit in wallets, there would have been some excuse for misleading us. The Aadhaar card is in fact a laminated abomination.

However, Nandan, we can appreciate that your original ideas and original dreams for India may have been pushed aside by politicians.

Is UID/Aadhaar truly optional?

Even a blind man can see the game here. Aadhaar is not compulsory as far as UIDAI is concerned, however registrars, the agencies with which UIDAI has signed contracts, who are engaged in registering people, like state governments, banks, insurance companies, etc., etc., can make it compulsory. They can, and are, doing this both directly (by order) or indirectly) by making it difficult to live an orderly life without it.

Is UID/Aadhaar meant for the poor, who, in your estimation, lack identity, Nandan?

Afraid not, as the focus of all your registrars are not urban slums or rural villages, but metros. The people who are registering are those who already have multiple identifications (including, laughably, the very government servants, in state after state, who are issued state security-recognised cards, and for whom verification has never been an issue).

Can you please explain why you avoided the meeting with NAC – the National Advisory Council? Was it cold feet, or the fact you could no longer continue to lie?

And can you explain why you had no answers for the important questions raised by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, the major hurdle between you and legitimacy for your identity project?

Surely someone like you could have answered these questions in your sleep. Are you playing politics already? It seems so, for you deliberately misled the country when you 'forgot' to mention this fact, in your televised interview with Shekhar Gupta (“Walk the Talk”-This with-us-or-against-us is the kind of line used in the Iraq war). You professed great admiration for Parliamentarians and the Standing Committee, saying, “These people have done their homework. They have asked us tonnes of questions.” No mention of the fact that you did not, or could not, answer the questions.

If you genuinely believe in UID/Aadhaar, Nandan, why are you afraid to debate the topic with fellow IITians? Surely you are not scared of debates, and do not believe that IITians are either with you or against you? You are welcome to invite your quizzing partner Jairam Ramesh, and even your mentor Mr Narayana Murthy, to be part of your debating team, to face a few IITians, whom you call – dismiss as? - activists. Forget a debate, we are happy with a simple public Q & A session, if and when that suits you.

One day soon, you will wake up and realise that the “world is not flat”; that even poor people each already have an identity, and should not be bastardised by a system that refuses to recognise it; and lastly you will regret having put your hands to serve a system designed for corruption, using the self-same tools that will poison the high-flying principles you have espoused.

While the media is fickle, as any marketing person should know, and you are one of the best, your numerous awards confirm, perhaps you need to pay heed when even your 'protective cover', the Planning Commission, shies at the hike in costs you have just announced, from Rs 6,600 cr to Rs 17,900 cr. “A single UID, earlier estimated to cost around Rs 31 per person, may now end up in the Rs 400-500 territory,” reports the Indian Express, and, in a second article, “Concerned over the increase in costs and the duplication of work between the NPR and the UIDAI, the Plan panel proposes to soon write to the Prime Minister seeking his intervention.”

Last, but not least, Nandan, can you touch your heart and tell us that Anna Hazare's Jan Lok Pal Bill movement is wrong, and Anna and his supporters should be arrested and thrown into prisons?

Parliament does not think so, and has agreed to meet the conditions he suggested as the basis for moving to a Constitutional solution to the issue. It seems that activism, and a people's movement – amiably divided on several issues, but united in purpose – does have the potential to arrest corruption in its tracks.

UPA ministers argue that Jan Lok Pal movement is unconstitutional and is an attempt at blackmail. How about Aadhaar? Is it constitutional? Was it debated nationwide, like the Jan Lok Pal Bill? Does it have approval from the Parliament? afraid not.

In your interview with Shekar Gupta, you said the Lok Pal Bill alone will not fix corruption in India and we need ten to fifteen projects (like UID, costing a few hundred billions) to fix all systems.

We learn that most Central Govt employees of India including the PM use free (and very insecure) email accounts, such as 'Yahoo! Mail', 'Gmail', etc., even for official communications. They do this because the National Informatics Center has not made it possible for emails to be sent and read on mobile devices, which is the preferred way in India (as stated by the article we read). This causes security and legal problems for the government.

It is a disgrace that a nation which boasts about its IT might, and boasts of UID becoming the 'World's Largest Database', cannot have secure email even for the PM.

Nandan, it is time to stand up and confess that you made a mistake.

You did not do your homework and were piggy backing on US Real ID Card and UK ID Cards that were eventually dumped, and did not realise that the government will make use of you, and manipulate you, making you look like a show pony, parroting your government approved lines of rhetoric.

In Indian politics, you are like a fish out of water, and do you know why? You can't mince words, and are too used to speaking the truth, and speaking your mind.

Talk to us, Nandan, and we will explain to you why Aadhaar, the White Elephant, is wrong for India.

1563 - Sticker shock - Indian Express

Posted: Tue Aug 30 2011, 03:51 hrs

The Unique Identification project is a mission of surpassing ambition — it aims to provide every Indian citizen a unique 12-digit number that can be used to call up basic demographic and identity information through biometric scans. The government sees it as giving every Indian an acknowledged existence, ensuring that no one is locked out of social entitlements for the lack of a scrap of official paper. It hopes to ensure sharper targeting of welfare programmes, minimise leakages and collapse the many cumbersome IDs currently in use, into a single number. Critics of the project have focused on the privacy hazards and surveillance possibilities of the scheme. The UIDAI’s rationale has been that the clear benefits outweigh potential dangers to privacy, which can, in any case, be averted by strong safeguards.

However, the philosophical battle apart, the UID has a more concrete cost-benefit analysis to contend with. The project’s cost has escalated many times since it was first conceived in February 2009. A single UID, earlier estimated to cost around Rs 31 per person, may now end up in the Rs 400-500 territory. First, the finance ministry balked at the new levels of spending — partly data compilation costs, from designated registrars — and suggested the UID mesh its efforts with the national census wherever possible. It also wants to trim the biometric technology costs — the iris scan has nearly tripled the UID’s price tag. While the UID defends its choices, and says the high volume of iris devices and software demanded by India will bring the price down, others in the Planning Commission claim the iris scan was intended as an extra measure to prevent duplication, not thrown in with every ID. These are not arguments to be settled on notions, and it would be timely for the UID to make a persuasive case for its choice. The Planning Commission has also expressed its concern about the UID’s registrar system (which includes public and private companies), asking for clear lines of responsibility and supervision. The UIDAI had even suggested a cash incentive for some of these registrars, a plan that met with serious objection.

Those are valid questions, and the UID authorities must be prepared to defend their decisions. Even though, as they claim, the UID’s long-term benefits in efficiency might justify the money spent, it should not let its own phenomenal scale blind it to the opportunity for frugality, and for dispensing information to the public, at every point.

1582 - Plan panel, Parliamentary committee red flag rising UID costs - Indian Express

Surabhi,

Posted: Mon Aug 29 2011, 01:08 hrs

New Delhi:

The government’s ambitious project to provide a unique identification number to all residents in the country is facing opposition from two unexpected fronts – the Planning Commission, over almost tripling of costs due to iris scan and the Parliamentary standing committee on finance, over ownership of the project.

The Nandan Nilekani-led Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) proposal to include iris scan and expand the enrolment drive to 1.12 billion is estimated to increase its budget from Rs 6,600 crore now to Rs 17,900 crore. Along with this, the fund needs of the Registrar General of India (RGI) or the Census office to complete the creation of the National Population Register, too has more than doubled from Rs 3,254 crore to Rs 7,732.85 crore. The NPR is also collecting biometric data of all residents and NPR cards will include UID numbers.

Concerned over the increase in costs and the duplication of work between the NPR and the UIDAI, the Plan panel proposes to soon write to the Prime Minister seeking his intervention. The PM chairs the Planning Commission and had set up the UIDAI as an office attached to the Commission.

The standing committee on finance too is learnt to have raised concerns over the costs and also the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, that seeks to provide legal backing to the project.

The Indian Express sent a detailed e-mail questionnaire to UIDAI Chairman Nandan Nilekani on the issue of costs and iris scanning, but did not get a response. Sources in UIDAI, however, said these issues are not serious given the benefits that will accrue to the public delivery system.

“These will be sorted out. The authority is keeping the finance ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office apprised of its plans,” a source in UIDAI said.

In fact, in a status paper last year, the UIDAI tried to clear the air on the high costs of iris scan. “The current high prices for iris technology are a result of low volume and its use in cost insensitive security applications. Considering the large demand that will come from India for iris devices and software, the UIDAI expects the prices for devices and software to fall rapidly,” it had said.

“A specific decision was never taken by the government to include iris scan. In 2010, it was explicitly said iris scan will be used only if it was decided after thorough examination that such a biometric is needed to stop de-duplication. But the UIDAI wants to include it as a third biometric after photographs and fingerprints,” a senior Planning Commission official said.

Besides, with the inclusion of iris data, the estimated data size per resident has gone up multifold from 150 kilobytes to 5 megabytes.
The Parliamentary committee has also raised concerns over the reporting structure of the UIDAI and the contracts being awarded by it to multiple registrars for enrolling residents.
“The UIDAI is technically reporting to the Planning Commission, but the latter has expressed ambiguity over the structure. If such a massive project is being carried out to capture information on biometrics, then a clear line of monitoring and responsibility has to be put in place,” a person close to the development said.

1581 - Senior citizens ‘tough catch’ for UID - e Paper Times of India

Senior citizens ‘tough catch’ for UID
It’s difficult to take their biometrics as age wears out finger tip areas, whereas ailments like cataract make iris scanning inaccurate
S Kushala 

kushala.satyanarayana@timesgroup.com

The fingerprints and retina scan of Shivakumar Swamiji of Siddaganga Mutt 

could not be done as he is 100-plus

    For the UID’s Aadhaar enrolment process that has started off on a big scale, the mandatory bio-metrics (10 fingers) and iris (retina) scanning is posing a challenge for senior citizens.
 

    Normally, seniors with prolonged diabetes suffer from eye-related ailments — cataract, retina damage or partial blindness. With old age comes wear and tear of the skin around the fingertips. The first such learning experience for UID enrolment officials was Shivakumar Swamiji of Tumkur’s Siddaganga Mutt whose retina scan or fingerprints could not be captured due to his 100-plus age.
 

    Using its discretionary powers, the e-governance department, which is the nodal agency for implementing Aadhaar in Karnataka, will selectively exempt such elders from the mandatory fields without denying them the UID card. Among other details, the enrolment process involves recording all 10 fingers and a retina scan.
 

    Due to the age factor, the finger tip area can get worn out and the biometric scanning may not be accurate in the initial attempts.
 

    “Normally four attempts are done for people whose fingertips are worn out. We decide to take the best of the four prints. But if all the recordings are hazy, then the supervisor uses his discretion to give an exemption. In Shivakumar Swamiji’s case, we could neither take the fingerprint recording nor the retina scan due to his body structure and age. So he was photographed in one particular posture,’’ D S Ravindran, chief executive officer, Centre for e-Governance, said.
 

    The 104-year-old swamiji completed all the four attempts for bio metrics, but was unsuccessful.
 

    “It is only in rare cases that both iris and bio metrics will fail. Otherwise, it’s usually the finger printing that fails. In such cases, we link the iris and complete the enrolment process,’’ Ravindran added.
 

    People with disabilities — with fewer fingers or damaged/severed fingers — will be considered for Aadhaar as their bio metrics can still be completed. For retina scanning, unless there is damage to the eye balls, if the eye lids are closed or blind, the process can be attempted.
 

    Which means, blind or partially blind are also included in the enrolment process. In such cases, finger printing will be used as a link.
 

    “People wearing coloured lenses were asked to remove them for retina scanning. Those with cataract or partial blindness also got through. But if the eye balls are damaged, then it’s a difficult case,’’ said a coordinator at one of the enrolment centres.

1580 - No iris, no finger prints, yet you get UID number - iGovernment

Monday 29 August 2011

The UIDAI has made arrangements to allot unique numbers to the disabled persons who have no iris or finger prints to offer their biometric samples
 

Submitted on 06/06/2011 - 10:05:55 AM
By Chandrabindu
 

Ranchi: Physical disability would not be any disqualification for the people in getting their Unique Identification Numbers—Aadhaar numbers.
 

The Unique Identification Development Authority of India (UIDAI) has put in place a mechanism to enrol the persons who don’t have eyes and fingers to offer their biometric samples.
 

“Such people can still get their Aadhaar numbers like others. The only difference will be that they would get it on the basic of demographic details instead of biometric details, as in case of the normal persons,” UIDAI Director General Ram Sevak Sharma said.
 

Sharma, who was here to sensitise the agencies tasked to enrol persons with disability, said those who get the Aadhaar numbers on the basis of demographic details, however, be restrained to authenticate themselves.
 

“They need to produce special documents to be supplied to those people for their own verification,” Sharma clarified.
The vendors on the job to collect biometric information of individuals like iris impression and fingerprints to ensure uniqueness have been told to take biometric details of the person with disability in the specified format of the application. The data collected by the vendor would be used to generate Aadhaar number for such persons.
 

Jharkhand Disability Commissioner Satish Chandra said there were about 3 lakh differently -abled persons in the State. Some of them might not be able to offer their biometric samples
 

“If someone is blind, print of all 10 fingers will be used to issue the unique ID. Again, if someone has no hands, scan of retina will do. We believe there is no one who is blind and has lost both hands, but if such a case comes to the fore we will have to see what can be done,” Ranchi UIDAI Assistant Director-General Arbind Prasad said.
 

The process of collection of data for issuing Aadhaar numbers in the state had kicked off from Ratu block in September 2010. What initially began in rural pockets was extended to urban areas on May 7 this year. Jharkhand has a population of 3.29 crore.
 

As of now, 600,000 people have already been issued Aadhaar numbers while data entry of another 17 lakh has been completed.

1579 - UID is peril: VS - City Journal

Thiruvanantha puram: CPI(M) senior leader V S Achuthanandan said that the Unique Identification Number Database system that gathers details of the citizens is motivated by vested interests and is dangerous to the integrity of the civil society. He demanded that the centre drop the Aadhar (UID) project considering the social and ethical impact that it can have on the public.
 

"Such projects were tried out and given up by several countries after realising the dangers involved and in India it is being pushed to serve the interests of the industrial lobby," a statement issued by the opposition leader.
 

Several districts have already begun the process of UID implementation, including Thrissur. Under the scheme, biometric statistics of individuals such as their thumb impression and details of retina are collected.
 

Achuthanandan said experts are of the view that these biometric features could be manipulated in the UID card, which could lead to serious security issues later.
Also, the whole project posed the ethical question of invasion into the privacy of individuals.
 

The Citizenship Act of 1955 and Citizenship Rules of 2003 concerning the national registry of population did not insist on the need to collect biometric details of people.
 

Achuthanandan said a circular had been issued by the Department of Public Instructions in Kerala, ordering school authorities to collect details of children for the UID without the prior consent of them or their parents.

1578 - Drop Aadhaar project: VS - The Hindu

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, August 27, 2011

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

‘Violates provisions of Citizenship Act'
Leader of the Opposition V.S. Achuthanandan has asked the government to drop the ‘Aadhaar' project.

Noting that fingerprints and other biometric information of citizens were being collected under the project, Mr. Achuthanandan said in a statement here on Friday that ‘Aadhaar' violated provisions of the Citizenship Act of 1955 and Citizenship Rules of 2003, neither of which permitted collection of biometric information of Indian citizens.

The State government, which was pushing ahead with the project in Kerala, appeared little concerned about the serious concerns being expressed the world over about the implications of the UID project for citizen's right to privacy and security.

Even students were not being spared in the State. The Director of Public Instruction (DPI) had issued a circular seeking collection of personal data of students. In order to hide the fact that this was being done as part of ‘Aadhaar,' the information was being collected under a scheme called ‘Sampoorna,' he said.

Accusing the Central government of having decided to go ahead with the ‘Aadhaar' project spending huge sums of money to suit the interests of the commercial lobby, Mr. Achuthanandan said there was widespread fear that the Centre would use the project to abdicate its social welfare commitments and implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) at the national level and the public distribution system in the State.

The Opposition Leader said the Central government's decision to go ahead with the ‘Aadhaar' project even before a discussion on the National Identification Authority Bill now before the Parliamentary Standing Committee indicated that it proposed to bypass the Parliament and the laws of the land.

In Kerala too, the ‘Aadhaar' project was being implemented without any discussion on its legal or social implications, Mr. Achuthanandan said.

1577 - Scrap UID project: Achuthanandan - MSN NEWS

Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 26 (PTI) CPI-M veteran V S Achuthanandan today demanded that the Centre abandon the Aadhar project to issue unique ID numbers to all citizens, considering security and ethical consequences involved.

"Similar projects had been given up by many countries after realising the dangers involved and in India it is being pushed to serve the interests of the industrial lobby," he said in a statement here.

Under the scheme, biometric statistics of individuals such as their thumb impression and details of retina are collected.

Achuthanandan said experts are of the view that these biometric features could be manipulated in the UID card, which could lead to serious security issues later.

Also, the whole project posed the ethical question of invasion into the privacy of individuals.

The Citizenship Act of 1955 and Citizenship Rules of 2003 concerning the national registry of population did not insist on the need to collect biometric details of people.

Achuthanandan said a circular had been issued by the Department of Public Instructions in Kerala, ordering school authorities to collect details of children for the UID without the prior consent of they or their parents.

1576 - No UID, no salary, Thane teachers told - TOI

Shreya Bhandary | Aug 26, 2011, 01.22AM IST

MUMBAI: Teachers from schools and colleges in Thane are a worried lot.

A Government Resolution (GR) dated April 18 states that all those teaching at government-aided schools and colleges need to get their Unique Identification (UID) card created before August 20, or they will not receive their salaries for the month.

A notice has been pasted at the Thane Zilla Parishad Pay Unit and schools and college authorities have already informed their staff about it. "We have already informed our teachers to get their cards done as soon as possible. We haven't received any circular from the zilla parishad, but the notice has been put up at the bill submission centre and we are only following orders," said Harshida Someshwar, principal (junior college) of NKT College in Thane.

"The circular has been sent out to all schools and colleges in Thane. The GR clearly states that teachers need to get the UID cards by August 20 and only exceptional cases will be granted a deadline till September 30. Almost 30% schools have replied saying that their staff has applied for the cards and should receive it soon," said Ashok Misal, education officer (secondary), Thane Zilla Parishad.

Though not happy about the directive, teachers have been scrambling to get their UID cards. "There are very few UID card centres in Thane district and we have had no time to visit the few centres here. It is unfair to stop our salaries for this card," said a junior college teacher on condition of anonymity. Mumbai division, however, has not introduced any such circular for teachers. "We understand the problems of teachers and they should know that nobody will lose their salaries. The GR has been announced to ensure that people get working on the UID cards at the earliest," said an education official from Mantralaya.

Mumbai: A Government Resolution (GR) has put teachers from schools and colleges in trouble. The GR dated April 18 says all those teaching at government aided schools and colleges need to get their Unique Identification (UID) card, also known as Aadhar Card, done before August 20, or they will not receive their salaries for the month.

A notice has been pasted at the Thane Zilla Parishad Pay Unit and school and college authorities have already informed their staff about it. "We have already informed our teachers to get their cards done as soon as possible. We haven't received any circular from the Zilla Parishad but this notice has been pasted at the bill submission centre and we are only following orders," said Harshida Someshwar, principal (junior college) of NKT College in Thane. Many schools and colleges are yet to receive this circular.

"The circular has been sent out to all schools and colleges in Thane. The GR clearly states that teachers need to get the UID cards by August 20 and only exceptional cases will be granted a deadline till September 30. Almost 30% schools have already replied saying that their staff has already applied for the cards and should receive it soon," said Ashok Misal, education officer (secondary), Thane Zilla Parishad.

Teachers, even though not happy about this circular, are busy getting their UID cards done. "There are very few UID card centres in Thane district and we have had no time to visit the few centres here. It is unfair to stop our salaries for this card as there is still a lot of time left," said a junior college teacher, on condition of anonymity.

Mumbai division, however, has introduced no such circular for school and college teachers. "We understand the problems of teachers and they should know that nobody will lose their salaries. The GR has been announced to ensure that people get working on the UID cards at the earliest," said an education official from Mantralaya.

1575 - UIDAI isuued 2.87 crore Aadhar numbers - Governance Now

UID will better the service delivery, reiterates Nilekani
PRATAP VIKRAM SINGH | AUGUST 24 2011

Reiterating the intent of the ‘Aadhar’ project, which aims to better the state of service delivery in the country, Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) said the authority is presently enrolling nearly 5 to 6 lakh people a day and would be achieving the rate of a million enrollment a day, shortly. 

Providing the latest update, Nilekani said, that till date 2.87 Aadhar or UID numbers have been issued.  For enrollments, the authority has collaborated with 70 partners and there are 30,000 enrollment stations across the country. Nilekani was speaking at a interactive session organised by FICCI in the Capital.

Under this initiative, the government has also embarked on expanding the financial cover through requesting banks to open the bank accounts for as much as 10crore of the population. Moreover, the banks have been asked to depute a banking correspondent (BC) over 2000 of the rural population.

On authority's mandate, he said that it is limited to assigning numbers, and that development of applications for various services and other purposes will be done by the government agencies, industry, entrepreneurs and innovators. 

The first level of application will be the integration of UID with the basic government to citizen service delivery like with public distribution system, rural employment guarantee scheme, and the business to citizen services in telecom, banking and other sectors.

The authentication of the contractual and lowest level workers employed by the private and public organisations, could be an example of the second level of applications.  The third and fourth level of applications would be developed by the industry, individuals or the innovators for purposes which people are not aware of yet and are unseen.

By 2014, the UIDAI has a target of assigning UID number to 60crore of the population.

1574 - Aadhaar: It’s the Economy, Stupid! - Identity Project

Submitted by swagato on Tue, 08/23/2011 - 16:41

The UID has been generally discussed within the framework of governance and civil liberties. From the state’s point of view it is a project which will provide the residents of India with a unique identification number – an ‘identity’ issued and authorised by it (the state). It can be used wherever the identity of a person needs to be established and rights and entitlements authenticated. On the face of it, this is a rational solution to the problems of identification and authentication faced by people in their daily lives. From civil liberty activists’ stand point, it will restrict and violate individual freedom. But there is another dimension to UID: its location and role in the market economy, which became evident in the UIDAI and NASSCOM sponsored conference in Bangalore in late June this year.

The Bangalore conference was targeted at the technology industry and UIDAI and Nasscom meant business. The first day of the conference was dedicated to the software developers. All very technical. The sessions on second day were more general; there were sector-wise policy oriented presentations.  The entire premise of the UIDAI’s pitch in the conference was that the UID project is an ecosystem comprising the government, people, vendors, developers, operators and applications or ‘apps’. Aadhaar would be the foundation for authentication of identity and private operators can build applications as layers on it. UIDAI assumes that in the near future authentication and identification would become crucial issues, if not central, in the economy and hence the UID ecosystem stands to become an attractive proposition for developers and operators. This ecosystem mimics the mobile telephone platforms like iPhone and Android – the “app market” model, where there are applications for almost every aspect of life. The entrepreneurial developers will see opportunity and innovate ‘apps’. Similar to the way paper money was replaced by plastic money or credit/debit cards for financial transactions, UID will solve the problem of authenticating a transacting party.

In the Bangalore conference, the UIDAI was trying to woo developers and make an argument for economic viability of the UID ecosystem. It was clear that UIDAI wants the platform to be of commercial nature over which economic transactions can take place. Two questions arise: When and why did ‘transaction’ become a problem? If it is a commercial infrastructure, then who stands to benefit most from the design of this system?

The market is about transactions or exchanges. In transactions, even before legal/contractual obligations set in, there is a question of trust between people. If the transaction takes place face to face, then it may be assumed that the trust deficit and information asymmetry among them are not serious enough. But where the transactions take place between unknown people or involve many people/multiple agents, then trust deficit and information asymmetry become significant issues. Authentication of one or both the parties and thereby verifying them and their rights and entitlements helps in creating this trust between two unknown individuals. Identification helps in establishing a person by providing his/her background.  

The UIDAI claims that UID number will solve the problem of the kirana shops and small traders. It is argued that they tend to adversely select their customers and cannot avoid default by the latter. In case of lending, they cannot check the creditworthiness and credit history of the borrowers. Thus, the claim being made is that the Aadhaar number will solve these problems by providing information about a person. But this, in my opinion, is a misplaced understanding of how an informal economy works.

In the informal economy, transactions are generally of small amounts and usually take place either face-to-face or follow the social referral system, i.e. information is sought from within the social network in selecting a customer or a business partner. Transactions in an informal economy do not generally follow the principle of an open market; it is generally a closed network. Therefore, the UIDAI’s claim of helping small traders is seemingly incorrect. Intentionally or unintentionally the design of the Aadhaar platform is biased towards large volumes of anonymous transactions, which is a feature of the organised sector, where large capital rules.

To receive legitimacy the UIDAI promises to make the social welfare system ‘efficient’ and root out leakages, fake beneficiaries and ‘benefit-frauds’. However, the very idea of welfare is shifting. The ‘Third Way’ position floated by the Blair-Clinton regime had already argued that a government should not produce; rather it should procure from the market. Welfare benefits like education, health, etc. should not be ‘produced’ by the government, but should be ‘procured’ from the market. The latest twist is that the government should not involve in procuring directly. Rather it should offer cash or coupons to the beneficiaries, who will go to the ‘supplier’ of their ‘choice’, as a proper consumer does in a competitive market. On the other hand since business means money, policy-talk of “financial inclusion” and “cash transfer” indicated towards that money. This, as Mr Rajendra Pawar of NIIT claimed at the UID-NASSCOM conference, would start a “government-supported-entrepreneurship.” Central and state governments have always been large spenders and consumers. It is expected that more cash would be injected in the rural economy by the cash transfer schemes. This is purported to bring a large number of people into the financial market, either as recipients of cash from the government or as consumers of newer financial as well as material commodities. In this market, financial companies will face a large number of unknown individuals and the conventional model of paper trail would increase transaction costs. This is where the Aadhaar number becomes important: it establishes the identity of a person whom a financial company would deal with; a ‘business correspondent’ of the company can use a handheld device to complete the transaction and record the necessary information. Secondly, cash or coupons would be provided by the state to avail services like education and health, which were hitherto ‘supplied’ by the state, from the market. This market for education and health would require means to connect the ‘beneficiaries’ with the ‘service providers’ or ‘government-supported-entrepreneurs’, to identify the beneficiary and authenticate his/her/their entitlements. Again, the Aadhaar number becomes crucial in bridging the gap.

Thus, whether transactions in the economy are biased towards large companies or the social welfare sector, the Aadhaar number is very much part of the new economic structure and the market economy. This is perhaps why the UIDAI database has become more powerful than the National Population Register (NPR), both of which are in the business of recording biometric information of the residents. UIDAI has inverted the security imperative of NPR and converted it into an economic rationality, and thereby has received an enthusiastic support from economic players.

1573 - Over 2.8 Crore Unique Identity Numbers Issued _ News One

POSTED ON 24TH AUGUST 2011

New Delhi, Aug 24 (IANS) Over 2.8 crore Aadhaars — unique identity numbers (UID) — have so far been issued across the country with Andra Pradesh leading the project having issued 9.6 lakh Aadhaars alone, Nandan Nilekani, chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) said Wednesday.
 

‘We have issued 2.87 crore Aadhaars till now. Everyday almost 5 to 6 lakh people are being issued the UID,’ said Nilekani in an Information Technology Committee meeting here.
 

‘We are confident that we can scale it up to 1.2 billion people,’ he added.
 

The UIDAI targets to issue 60 crore Aadhaars by 2014.
Nilekani also insisted that under the UID project privacy will be protected and personal data will not be accessible to everybody.
 

Legal experts have been sceptical about the protection of private data with the rollout of UID numbers as they fear the number, which will be issued based on personal information given by a person, might be leaked to various other agencies.
 

Denying that Aadhaar can be mandatory, Nilekani said: ‘It can’t be mandatory as of now but over the years individual agencies could well make it mandatory.’
 

The unique identification project aims to issue a unique number ‘Adhaar’ to all Indians which would provide a database of residents containing very simple data in biometrics. A 12-digit unique number, Adhaar will be stored in a centralised database and will be easily verifiable in an online, cost-effective way.

1572 - Inquisitive UIDAI wants all details about you and I - Deccan Herld

Big Brother watching
Inquisitive UIDAI wants all details about you and I
Bangalore, Aug 12, DHNS:

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Karnataka, which is all set to begin its ambitious “Aadhar” enrolment in Bangalore from August 17, has kicked up a row even before its formal launch by “surreptitiously” widening the scope of the ID card beyond the officially stated position.

On the second day of the special enrolment for mediapersons and their families in the City — as a precursor to the launch for general public —there were heated arguments between applicants and officials, as the enrolment forms distributed by the officials did not match the forms put out by the UIDAI on its website and seemed to be far wider in its scope, seeking personal details.

Several applicants for enrolment objected to the columns asking for details of bank account numbers and the LPG gas connection numbers. Some people who had not brought their passbooks or gas connection receipts were turned away, leading to protests. The officials later clarified that the submission of the information they sought was “voluntary” and continued registering others who had left the columns in the application form unfilled.

In fact, there is a wide disparity between the form specified by the UIDAI  on its official website and the one being used by its Karnataka unit. The official form has three parts: Part A seeks details like name, gender, age, name of father/husband/guardian and the residential address. Part B seeks “additional information” like phone number/ mobile number and email address which are all “optional”.

Part C deals with “financial information” like bank name, branch and account number with a clause “I want to link my existing bank a/c to Adhaar and I have no objection on this issue.” It is operational only if the assignee affixes his signature. The form printed by the Karnataka UIDAI  does not make any of the information sought optional. In fact, it goes well beyond its stated objective by including a section titled ‘Data collection for state government.’

It is a long list, starting from “availing any social security pension” to “Sandhya Suraksha,” “physically handicapped person”, “destitute/widow pension”, “old age pension”, “ration card”, “NREGA job card”, “member of milk cooperative society”, and so on.

The bio-metric details of all ten fingers, the iris and the face of the applicants are mandatorily captured. The form requires the assignee to put his signature to the clause, “I have no objection to my identity being authenticated for delivery of services from time to time by agencies to whom I present the UID number and I am aware that information provided by me for securing UID number shall be used for authenticating my identity.”

Neither state e-governance executive officer D S Ravindran nor principal secretary, department of IT/BT and e-governance M N Vidyasha n kar was available for comm ent, despite repeated att e mpts to contact them on the phone.

1571 - Identification, Surveillance, and Governance in Contemporary Society David Lyon

Identification, Surveillance, and Governance in Contemporary Society

David Lyon. Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveil lance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 192 pp.
$22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7456-4156-0.
 

Reviewed by Larry Frohmann (SUNY Stony Brook) Published on H-German (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Benita Blessing

 

National identification cards are everywhere, and, as David Lyon demonstrates in this timely, well argued book, a sub ject in need of careful analysis because of the pervasive ways in which these cards, along with the population databases to which they are tethered, are structuring our everyday existence and, in so doing, raising important questions about personal freedom and the meaning of citizenship in modern societies.
 

Almost every country has some kind of national ID card program; they are mostly mandatory; many of them require fingerprints; and a small but growing number include additional biometric information.
 

ID cards are also high up on the political agenda of those countries that do not have them. In the United States, the implementation of the Bush administration’s Real ID program, which would have made state driver’s licenses into a de facto national ID card, has encountered widespread resistance from both the public and the states. Australia’s proposed Access Card has similarly run aground, as have ID card schemes in Canada and France, and the Japanese Juki-Net system is leading only a stunted existence. The British, on the other hand, approved the Identity Cards Act in 2006–only to see the program scrapped by the new Conservative government.[1] 

A number of different arguments have been advanced over the years in support of such cards. In addition to their obvious (or at least assumed) role in enhancing domestic and international security, proponents argue that national ID cards can make it easier for citizens to interact with government agencies (and sometimes the private sector as well), increase government efficiency by both reducing welfare and tax fraud and facilitating access to public services by qualified individuals, provide the validation needed for e-government, help combat identity theft, and facilitate trans-border travel in a more mobile, liquid modernity. The issue that Lyon addresses in this book is how these national ID cards–and the processes, databases, information systems, and protocols on which the functioning of these identification systems depends–are altering the meaning of citizenship in the modern world.
 

Over the past decade, Lyon has written widely on various aspects of surveillance and identification.
 

Identifying Citizens pulls together many of his ideas on surveillance, security, and identity, and the book needs to be read in particular in conjunction with Playing the Identity Card, a companion volume of theoretical explorations and national case studies, which Lyon edited with Colin Bennett.[2] Lyon’s main argument in the current book is that the process of identifying citizens necessarily leads to the intensified surveillance of the population, which, he  says, happens “when organizations pay close attention, in routine and systematic ways, to personal data” (p. 5). Before the computer age, most identification documents were issued locally, and, in view of the difficulty in maintaining any centralized register, the identification process focused on verifying the authenticity of the documents themselves. What is novel about modern identification systems, especially those using new electronic ID cards, is that the identity of the carrier is now established by querying the personal information contained in networked, searchable databases–above all, computerized national population registries–which encode and disseminate the data that define the administrative identity of the person. Lyon’s arguments here about the ways in which ID cards, ID numbers, computers, and population registries are intimately linked in modern population identification systems are spot-on. However, one point where I would disagree with him is his claim (p. 42) that the focus on stop-and-search authority diverts attention away from these linkages because  this argument itself overlooks the fact that in most instances it is only through such encounters that the state actively attempts to determine the identity of any given individual.
 

The more expansive the scope of the social state, the more intense its security concerns, and the greater the desire to leverage this information for commercial purposes, the greater will be the scope of this routinized collection of personal information. Moreover, this active process of “identifying” the individual is by no means a neutral, technical process, Lyon argues, because the finer the granularity of this identifying information collected by the state, the greater will be the potentiality for treating citizens differently according to their respective administrative identities.
 

In fact, the very purpose of querying these databases is to determine whether the individual does or does not possess those particular characteristics that can prove that he or she is a legitimate member of the community, whether he or she is eligible for some specific privilege or service, or whether the person should be selected for further scrutiny as a potential welfare cheat, unregistered worker, criminal, or terrorist. Chapter 1 provides a brief survey of the historical roots of modern concerns with the legibility of the population. Lyon traces these back to the need for more effective government in colonial contexts, efforts to combat crime, and the need to identify and mobilize the nation’s resources for war. He is particularly concerned that, despite the not unreasonable claims that modern identification systems can provide greater security and convenience for the holder, these systems will be forever burdened politically by these “negative histories” (pp. 37-38) that are seemingly hardwired into their most elemental structures and that serve to amplify, rather than neutralize, historical patterns of discrimination.
 

In other words, the process of identification always entails what Lyon has elsewhere called social sorting, which is simply another way of describing the ways in which the politics of difference are built into databases and identification systems.[3] Chapter 2 explores the functioning and politics of computerized social sorting. Here Lyon argues that the subtle exclusionary bias that seems to exist in all identification systems as their most primal raison d’ˆetre is  becoming more pronounced in conjunction with the broad shift in public mood from the focus on concrete risks to a new concern with “precaution,” which  requires the open-ended collection of personal information in an effort to forestall the occurrence of precisely those risks that can never be rendered determinate or calculable. This precautionary imperative, which often justifies the integrative function creep that Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have called the “surveillant assemblage,”[4] poses obvious dangers to civil liberties, and for Lyon the question is “can identification processes which inevitably are ’sorting systems’ yet be made compatible with the desires of ordinary citizens not merely for national security but also for human security ... which is both more global and more personal” (p. 58)?
 

In chapter 3, Lyon advances two different sets of arguments. First, he takes over Niklas Rose’s idea of the “securitization of identity,” i.e., the predication of the enjoyment of certain rights or freedoms–such as rights to vote or social services, the right to cross borders, the right to purchase goods at a distance, use the Internet, or even communicate (as I learned on my last trip to Germany, where I was forced to prove my identity in order to buy a new SIM card for my American cell phone)–upon proof of identity or entitlement. However, he then argues with John Torpey against Rose that, although one should not see this securitization of identity simply as evidence of the expanding of the tentacles of the state, certain actors–such as the state–are much more weighty or important in this process than others (p. 69). In the next chapter, Lyon extends this argument by taking up Louise Amoore’s suggestion that this expanding use of identification cards as a means of access can be understood as a novel mode of “governance by identification” (p. 90), and here he rightly suggests that the spread of national ID systems is giving rise to “a particular way of seeing the world–indeed, of being in the world” (p. 63).
 

The second set of arguments that Lyon makes in chapter 3 relate to what he calls the “card cartel.” As I noted above, a number of different arguments have been advanced on behalf of national ID card systems, and commentators have often noted the opportunism with which these arguments have been employed in different contexts. In this chapter Lyon argues that, in addition to the long-standing interest of the state in identifying and controlling its citizens, the spread of national ID card systems has been influenced by  a number of high-tech corporations (with technology protocols and, increasingly, biometrics conditioning the operation of these systems). But rather than explaining the spread of these systems in terms of either economic or technological determinism, Lyon argues that the bases on which identification systems engage in social sorting always reflect the political culture or the political unconscious of the societies in which they operate: “New ID schemes tend to create citizens in the image of the leading motifs of the societies that give them birth. In societies dominated by consumption, it is unsurprising that citizenship is subtly recreated in terms of consuming....
 

Equally, if the leading motifs informing ’citizenship’ are ones designed to root out and outlaw certain specified groups, then identification processes will reflect this” (p. 81). And here, as well as elsewhere in the book, Lyon’s arguments reflect his belief that, whatever the specific context and motive advanced, such systems are valued precisely because of their intrinsic function of sorting and discriminating among the individual members of the population. External borders are one of the chief points at which citizen identities are administratively verified.
 

In addition to governance by identification, chapter4 also discusses the interoperability of identification systems and their relation to mobility, modernity, and the need for identification at a distance in response to the intensification of movement across national borders. 

Here, Lyon argues that the International Civil Aviation Organization in particular has played a pivotal role in promoting the globalization of interoperable identification systems and standardized, machine-readable ID cards and in “policy laundering” by permitting national politicians to present domestically unpalatable ID card policies as an unavoidable response to requirements imposed by a politically unaccountable international authority.
 

Chapter 5 addresses the role of biometrics in identification systems. According to Lyon, the very availability of biometric technologies tends to increase the frequency with which vulnerable groups are required to identify themselves. In this way, they tend to reinforce the pre-existing negative stereotypes of such persons. But Lyon also makes a set of more intriguing arguments about the relationship between the human body and biometric information about the body. The purpose of biometrics is to establish a perfect connection between an individual body and the set of personal information associated with an individual identity, that is, to definitively attach this information to a specific living person. Lyon argues that the particular intimacy of such biometric data will require a rethinking of the meaning of bodily integrity, although he shies away from using the word “privacy” to describe this intimacy. This attempt to privilege certain kinds of information runs contrary to the privacy concept that informed the ma jor pieces of privacy legislation from the 1970s. These laws, which were passed in response to the advent of precisely the net worked databases that Lyon is describing here, were an attempt to respond to the growing realization that the real danger to personal privacy came not from the misuse of privileged data, but rather from the everyday collection, processing, and electronic dissemination of personal information that enjoyed no special protection. Since any piece of personal information could–depending on the context and the way it was combined with other pieces of information be used to the disadvantage of the individual, privacy advocates argued that the individual had the right to control the initial collection and subsequent use of personal information. Despite the fact that Lyon has always preferred to emphasize the importance of political control over surveillance systems rather than the defense of privacy rights, his argument here appears to pivot incongruously on the belief that bodily, biometric information ought to be privileged in some way or another.
 

Lyon concludes his discussion of biometrics by suggesting that the biometricization of identity can never reach its holy grail and provide a definitive verification of an individual identity, because biometrics are caught in a vicious circle: The same categories of biometric information (fingerprint or facial recognition algorithms, for example) that are gained by bstracting certain haracteristics from the body are, in the process of identification, simply pro jected back upon the body as they define or construct the corporeal self (p. 125). There is no privileged access to the reality of the body outside of the biometric language through which it is constructed.
 

The greatest strengths of the book are, first, Lyon’s analysis of the relation between ID cards and the databases on which ID cards systems depend for their functioning; second, his multifaceted account of the intrinsic and apparently inescapable exclusionary or discriminatory effects of such surveillance technologies; and, third, his description of the role of identification systems as a mechanism of governance and the ways in which they are shaping our being-in-the-world. In the concluding chapter on cybercitizenship, Lyon restates many of the arguments that were advanced in previous chapters and asks whether it might be possible to conceive of an ID card system that would not have the negative consequences that he has analyzed in such detail. The answer, Lyon suggests, may be found in an ethics of care, whose basic thrust would be to explicitly compensate for the stigmatizing, disciplinary effects inherent in governance through identification. However, while an ethics of care may make us more conscious of these problems, in his next work Lyon’s task will be to more fully explain the status and functioning of this ethic of care. That is, Lyon must reconcile the question of how one can at the same time categorize and classify people, without incurring the discriminatory consequences that, as he argued throughout this volume, may well be intrinsic to the identification process itself.
 

Notes
[1]. “ID card compensation ruled out as MPs
approve abolition,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-
politics-11319766.
[2]. David Lyon and Colin Bennett, eds., Playing
the Identity Card: Surveil lance, Security, and Identi-
fication in Global Perspective (New Brunswick: Rout-
ledge, 2008).
[3]. David Lyon, Surveil lance as Social Sorting:
Privacy, Risk, and Automated Discrimination (New
Brunswick: Routledge, 2002).
[4]. Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, “The
Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology
51, no. 4 (December 2000): 605-622.
[5]. Louise Amoore, “Governing by Identity,” in
Bennett and Lyon, eds., Playing the Identity Card,
21-36.
 

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Larry Frohmann. Review of Lyon, David, Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveil lance. H-
German, H-Net Reviews. August, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30999
 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

1570 - Massive Biometric Project Gives Millions of Indians an ID - Wired

By Vince Beiser   August 19, 2011  |  1:27 pm  

In India, hundreds of millions of impoverished people have no ID—which means no bank account, credit, insurance, or government aid. Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik; Fingerprints: Getty

The courtyard, just off a busy street in a Delhi slum called Mongolpuri, is buzzing with people—men in plastic sandals arguing with one another, women in saris holding babies on their hips, skinny young guys chattering on cheap cell phones. New arrivals take up positions at the end of a long queue leading to the gated entry of a low cement building. Every so often, a worker opens the gate briefly and people elbow their way inside onto a dimly lit stairway, four or five on each step. Slowly they work their way upward to a second-story landing, where they are stopped again by a steel grille.

After a long wait, a lean woman in a sequined red sari, three children in tow, has finally made it to the head of the line. Her name is Kiran; like many poor Indians, she uses just one name. She and her school-age brood stare curiously through the grille at the people and machines on the other side. Eventually, an unsmiling man in a collared shirt lets them into the big open room. People crowd around mismatched tables scattered with computers, printers, and scanners. Bedsheets nailed up over the windows filter the sun but not the racket of diesel buses and clattering bicycles outside. Kiran glances at the brightly colored posters in Hindi and English on the walls. They don’t tell her much, though, since she can’t read.

A neatly dressed middle-aged man leads the children to a nearby table, and a brisk young woman in a green skirt sits Kiran down at another. The young woman takes her own seat in front of a Samsung laptop, picks up a slim gray plastic box from the cluttered tabletop, and shows Kiran how to look into the opening at one end. Kiran puts it up to her face and for a moment sees nothing but blackness. Then suddenly two bright circles of light flare out. Kiran’s eyes, blinking and uncertain, appear on the laptop screen, magnified tenfold. Click. The oversize eyes freeze on the screen. Kiran’s irises have just been captured.

Kiran has never touched or even seen a real computer, let alone an iris scanner. She thinks she’s 32, but she’s not sure exactly when she was born. Kiran has no birth certificate, or ID of any kind for that matter—no driver’s license, no voting card, nothing at all to document her existence. Eight years ago, she left her home in a destitute farming village and wound up here in Mongolpuri, a teeming warren of shabby apartment blocks and tarp-roofed shanties where grimy barefoot children, cargo bicycles, haggard dogs, goats, and cows jostle through narrow, trash-filled streets. Kiran earns about $1.50 a day sorting cast-off clothing for recycling. In short, she’s just another of India’s vast legions of anonymous poor.

Now, for the first time, her government is taking note of her. Kiran and her children are having their personal information recorded in an official database—not just any official database, but one of the biggest the world has ever seen. They are the latest among millions of enrollees in India’s Unique Identification project, also known as Aadhaar, which means “the foundation” in several Indian languages. Its goal is to issue identification numbers linked to the fingerprints and iris scans of every single person in India.

That’s more than 1.2 billion people—everyone from Himalayan mountain villagers to Bangalorean call-center workers, from Rajasthani desert nomads to Mumbai street beggars—speaking more than 300 languages and dialects. The biometrics and the Aadhaar identification number will serve as a verifiable, portable, all but unfakable national ID. It is by far the biggest and most technologically complicated biometrics program ever attempted.

Aadhaar faces titanic physical and technical challenges: reaching millions of illiterate Indians who have never seen a computer, persuading them to have their irises scanned, ensuring that their information is accurate, and safeguarding the resulting ocean of data. This is India, after all—a country notorious for corruption and for failing to complete major public projects. And the whole idea horrifies civil libertarians. But if Aadhaar’s organizers pull it off, the initiative could boost the fortunes of India’s poorest citizens and turbocharge the already booming national economy.

It takes about 10 minutes to enter someone into the Aadhaar database.
Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik

The Indian government has tried to implement national identity schemes before but has never managed to reach much more than a fraction of the population. So when parliament set up the Unique Identification Authority of India in 2009 to try again with a biometrically based system, it borrowed a trick used by corporations all over the world: Go to an outsourcer. The government tapped billionaire Nandan Nilekani, the “Bill Gates of Bangalore.”

Nilekani is about as close to a national hero as a former software engineer can get. He cofounded outsourcing colossus Infosys in 1981 and helped build it from a seven-man startup into a $6.4 billion behemoth that employs more than 130,000 people. After stepping down from the CEO job in 2007, Nilekani turned most of his energy to public service projects, working on government commissions to improve welfare services and e-governance. He’s a Davos-attending, TED-talk-giving, best-seller-authoring member of the global elite, pegged by Time magazine in 2009 as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. This is the guy who suggested to golf buddy Thomas Friedman that the world was getting flat. “Our government undertakes a lot of initiatives, but not all of them work,” says B. B. Nanawati, a career federal civil servant who heads the program’s technology-procurement department. “But this one is likely to work because of Chairman Nilekani’s involvement. We believe he can make this happen.”

The Unique Identification Authority’s headquarters occupies a couple of floors in a hulking tower complex of red stone and mirrored glass on Connaught Place, the bustling center of Delhi. As chair of the project, Nilekani now holds a cabinet-level rank, but his shop looks more like a startup than a government ministry. When I show up in February, the walls of the reception area are still bare drywall, and the wiring and air-conditioning ducts have yet to be hidden behind ceiling tiles. Plastic-wrapped chairs are corralled in unassigned offices.

“I took this job because it’s a project with great potential to have an impact,” Nilekani says in his spacious office, decorated with only a collection of plaques and awards and an electric flytrap glowing purple in a corner. He’s a medium-size man of 56 with bushy salt-and-pepper hair and a matching mustache. His heavy eyebrows and lips and protuberant brown eyes give him a slightly baleful look, like the villain in a comic opera. “One basic problem is people not having an acknowledged existence by the state and so not being able to access things they’re entitled to. Making the poor, the marginalized, the homeless part of the system is a huge benefit.”

Aadhaar is a key piece of the Indian government’s campaign for “financial inclusion.” Today, there are as many as 400 million Indians who, like Kiran, have no official ID of any kind. And if you can’t prove who you are, you can’t access government programs, can’t get a bank account, a loan, or insurance. You’re pretty much locked out of the formal economy.

Today, less than half of Indian households have a bank account. The rest are “unbanked,” stuck stashing whatever savings they have under the mattress. That means the money isn’t gaining interest, either for its owner or for a bank, which could be loaning it out. India’s impoverished don’t have much to save—but there are hundreds of millions of them. If they each put just $10 into a bank account, that would add billions in new capital to the financial system.

To help make that happen, Nilekani has recruited ethnic Indian tech stars from around the world, including the cofounder of Snapfish and top engineers from Google and Intel. With that private-sector expertise on board, the agency has far outpaced the Indian government’s usual leisurely rate of action. Aadhaar launched last September, just 14 months after Nilekani took the job, and officials armed with iris and fingerprint scanners, digital cameras, and laptops began registering the first few villagers and Delhi slum dwellers. More than 16 million people have since been enrolled, and the pace is accelerating. By the end of 2011, the agency expects to be signing up 1 million Indians a day, and by 2014, it should have 600 million people in its database.

More than 1.2 billion indians will be in the system—the biggest biometrics database on earth.
Photos: Jonathan Torgovnik

The village of Gagenahalli sits amid a placid quilt of green millet and tomato fields in the hinterlands of Karnataka state, some 1,300 miles south of Delhi. Bulls with tassels on their horns pull wooden carts decorated with deities and demons past tiny, cheerily painted houses of dried mud. Old men and skinny cows lounge in the shade of baobab trees. It’s a lovely place to visit but a hard place to live. Many of Gagenahalli’s 8,500 residents are landless peasants, and about three-quarters subsist below India’s official poverty line, earning less than a dollar a day.

Most Indians still live in rural hamlets like this, so getting them enrolled in Aadhaar requires some creativity. One evening not long ago, a man walked through Gagenahalli’s red-dirt streets beating a drum and calling the villagers to gather outside—the traditional way to make public announcements. He explained that the government wanted everyone to visit the village schoolhouse in the weeks ahead to be photographed.

A few days later, Shivanna, a stringy 55-year-old farmer—again, with just the one name—presents himself in a cement classroom commandeered by the agency. He doesn’t know what it’s all about, nor is he particularly interested. “When the government asks to take your picture, you just go and do it,” he shrugs. Shivanna takes a worn plastic chair at one of the four enrollment stations set up about the room. All the computer gear and the single bare lightbulb are plugged into a stack of car batteries and kerosene-powered generators—the village gets only a few hours of electricity a day from the national grid.

A young man in a polo shirt records Shivanna’s personal information in a form on his laptop. It’s bare-bones stuff: name, address, age, gender (including the option of transgender). He has Shivanna look into a camera mounted on the laptop. Once the Aadhaar software tells him he’s got Shivanna’s full face in the frame and enough light, he snaps the picture. The program runs similar quality checks on the agent’s work as Shivanna looks into the iris scanner and then puts his fingers on the glowing green glass of the fingerprint scanner. “We had to dumb it down so that anyone could learn to use the software,” says Srikanth Nadhamuni, Aadhaar’s head of technology, as he watches the scan progress.

About 100 miles east of Gagenahalli is Bangalore, the center of India’s booming IT industry. In one of its southern suburbs, across a busy street from Cisco’s in-country headquarters, sits the office building housing Aadhaar’s Central ID Repository. The information collected from Shivanna the farmer, Kiran the rag sorter, and every other person enrolled in the Aadhaar system gets sent here, electronically or via couriered hard drive.

This is Nadhamuni’s domain. He’s a trim, energetic, half-bald engineer with geek-chic rectangular glasses. His English is full of the awesomes and likes that he picked up in Silicon Valley, where he worked for 14 years. In 2002, he, his engineer wife, and their two kids returned to India, and a year later he and Nilekani launched a nonprofit dedicated to digitizing government functions. Nilekani even kicked the organization a few million dollars.

Some of the projects that Nadhamuni worked on—computerizing birth and death records, improving the tracking of schoolkids in migrant worker families—impressed upon him how much India needed a central identity system. When Nilekani asked him to be point man for the task of wrangling Aadhaar’s data, Nadhamuni says, “I was, like, delighted.”

The offices, like the identity program’s Delhi headquarters, are still under construction. When I tour them, rolls of carpet tied with string are stacked along a wall, and workers’ bare feet have left plaster-dust prints in a corridor leading to an unfinished meeting room. The rows of cubicles that will eventually accommodate roughly 400 workers are only about half full. The wall intended for a dozen video monitors showing incoming data packets is, for now, empty.

Getting the poor into the system is a huge benefit, says Nandan Nilekani.
Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik

Each individual record is between 4 and 8 megabytes; add in a pile of quality-control information and the database will ultimately hold in the neighborhood of 20 petabytes—that is, 2 x 1016 bytes. That will make it 128 times the size of the biggest biometrics database in the world today: the Department of Homeland Security’s set of fingerprints and photos of 129 million people.

The unprecedented scale of Aadhaar’s data will make managing it extraordinarily difficult. One of Nadhamuni’s most important tasks is de-duplication, ensuring that each record in the database is matched to one and only one person. That’s crucial to keep scammers from enrolling multiple times under different names to double-dip on their benefits. To guard against that, the agency needs to check all 10 fingers and both irises of each person against those of everyone else. In a few years, when the database contains 600 million people and is taking in 1 million more per day, Nadhamuni says, they’ll need to run about 14 billion matches per second. “That’s enormous,” he says.

Coping with that load takes more than just adding extra servers. Even Nadhamuni isn’t sure how big the ultimate server farm will be. He isn’t even totally sure how to work it yet. “Technology doesn’t scale that elegantly,” he says. “The problems you have at 100 million are different from problems you have at 500 million.” And Aadhaar won’t know what those problems are until they show up. As the system grows, different components slow down in different ways. There might be programming flaws that delay each request by an amount too tiny to notice when you’re running a small number of queries—but when you get into the millions, those tiny delays add up to a major issue. When the system was first activated, Nadhamuni says, he and his team were querying their database, created with the ubiquitous software MySQL, about 5,000 times a day and getting answers back in a fraction of a second. But when they leaped up to 20,000 queries, the lag time rose dramatically. The engineers eventually figured out that they needed to run more copies of MySQL in parallel; software, not hardware, was the bottleneck. “It’s like you’ve got a car with a Hyundai engine, and up to 30 miles per hour it does fine,” Nadhamuni says. “But when you go faster, the nuts and bolts fall off and you go, whoa, I need a Ferrari engine. But for us, it’s not like there are a dozen engines and we can just pick the fastest one. We are building these engines as we go along.”

Using both fingerprints and irises, of course, makes the task tremendously more complex. But irises are useful to identify the millions of adult Indians whose finger pads have been worn smooth by years of manual labor, and for children under 16, whose fingerprints are still developing. Identifying someone by their fingerprints works only about 95 percent of the time, says R. S. Sharma, the agency’s director general. Using prints plus irises boosts the rate to 99 percent.

That 1 percent error rate sounds pretty good until you consider that in India it means 12 million people could end up with faulty records. And given the fallibility of little-educated technicians in a poor country, the number could be even higher. A small MIT study of data entry on electronic forms by Indian health care workers found an error rate of 4.2 percent. In fact, at one point during my visit to Gagenahalli, Nadhamuni shows me the receipt given to a woman after her enrollment; I point out that it lists her as a man. A tad flustered, Nadhamuni assures me that there are procedures for people to get their records corrected. “Perfect solutions don’t exist,” Nilekani says, “but this is a substantial improvement over the way things are now.”

For the past year or so, Mohammed Alam, 24, has spent his nights in a charity-run Delhi “night shelter” for the homeless. Inside the weathered cement building, nearly 100 men and one 3-year-old boy in various states of dishevelment sprawl on worn cotton mats in a gloomy open room. A bloody Bollywood action movie flickers on a small TV sitting on a folding table in a corner. The stench of ammonia wafts from the group bathroom across the foyer.

Alam looks markedly healthier than most of his compeers, his glossy black hair elaborately gelled and his teal shirt and jeans spotless. He left his home in Lucknow because of family problems he’d rather not specify and has been getting by in the capital ever since, doing odd labor jobs. In a good month, he pulls in about $50. That makes it hard to afford his own place to live. But the Unique Identification Authority came to enroll the shelter’s inhabitants a few weeks ago, and Alam just received a letter from the authority with his randomly generated 12-digit Aadhaar number.

The authority doesn’t issue cards or formal identity documents. Once enrolled, each person’s eyeballs and fingertips are all they need to prove who they are—in theory, anyway. For now Alam keeps the folded-up letter in his pocket. It serves as ID when the police stop him, he says. But more important, he just used it to open a bank account. “I tend to spend more money when it’s on me,” he says.

That’s exactly the kind of thinking Nilekani is counting on. One of his first major coups was persuading India’s central bank to declare the Aadhaar number adequate identification to issue no-frills accounts. Bringing biometrically verified banking to the poor could lead to enormous savings in government benefit programs—for both the recipients and the state. Today, a pensioner in a village like Gagenahalli has to take a bus to the nearest town to collect his monthly payment in cash. That’s time 

Local grocers could act as banks, doling out cash and accepting deposits for a small fee.

and money lost for him. Meanwhile, more than 40 percent of the government’s $250 billion in subsidies and other spending on the poor will be siphoned off by scammers over the next five years, according to investment group CLSA. Both problems could largely be solved if instead the funds were sent straight to bank accounts held by biometrically verified recipients. “It’s like having 1.2 billion pipes through which you can send the benefits directly,” Sharma says. Connecting the poor to banks could also enable some of them to get loans to start businesses or pay for their children’s education.

Banks, however, are in short supply in the countryside, where most Indians live; the one nearest to Gagenahalli is 7 miles away. That’s one reason only 47 percent of Indian households have bank accounts (compared with 92 percent in the US). So Indian financial institutions have begun introducing “business correspondents” into bankless areas, essentially deputizing some shopkeeper or other trusted local who has access to a little cash to handle villagers’ tiny deposits and withdrawals. Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Say Shivanna wants 50 rupees from his savings account. Instead of schlepping miles to an actual bank, he goes to the little kiosk down the road from his house. The guy in the kiosk scans Shivanna’s fingerprints with an inexpensive handheld machine. (There are several on the market already; other similar gadgets—and even cell phone apps—that scan irises are in the works.) Then he transmits the image via cellular network to the tech hub in Bangalore and gets a simple confirmation-of-identity message. (The same process works for deposits.) Once Shivanna’s identity is validated, the kiosk guy gives him his cash or deposit receipt, minus a small commission. Shivanna’s bank reimburses the kiosk guy. Shivanna saves time and money, the kiosk guy makes a little profit, the bank gets more capital, and the rising tide lifts all boats.

Many Indians' finger pads have been worn smooth by years of manual labor.
Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik

In practice, of course, all kinds of things might go wrong. “Some iris scanners can be fooled by a high-quality photo pasted onto a contact lens,” says a senior exec from a biometrics-equipment maker working on the project. Fingerprints can be lifted from almost anything you touch, and a laser-printer reproduction of one will have tiny ridges of ink that may fool scanners. Or a corrupt Aadhaar worker could pair a scammer’s name with someone else’s biometrics. The system is being built with open architecture so other agencies and businesses can add their own applications. The idea is to make Aadhaar a platform for all kinds of purposes beyond government benefits and banking, much like a smartphone is a platform for more than making phone calls. In January, the Indian Department of Communications declared Aadhaar numbers to be adequate ID to get a mobile phone. It’s easy to imagine the numbers being used to authenticate airline passengers, track students, improve land ownership records, and make health records portable. But opening up the Aadhaar system so widely makes it vulnerable. Each record is encrypted on the enroller’s hard drive as soon as it’s completed, and the central database will have state-of-the-art safeguards. Still, Sharma acknowledges, “there’s no lock in the world that can’t be broken.”

Anyway, Nadhamuni points out, credit card numbers are stolen all the time, but everyone still uses them because the card companies have come up with enough ways to spot when they’re being used fraudulently. In the big scheme of things, credit card fraud is a relatively small problem compared with the gigantic benefit of being able, say, to buy stuff online. He believes the same calculus will hold for Aadhaar. And if Aadhaar data is stolen, they have countermeasures to deal with it.

There’s also the question of whether India’s cell phone network, which will carry the bulk of the verification requests, can handle such a load. “We expect to be getting 100 million requests per day in a few years,” Nadhamuni says. “And the authentication needs to happen fast. The answer needs to come back in maybe five seconds.” Partly to meet that demand, the federal government is investing billions to massively expand the nation’s broadband capacity. “It’s not there yet,” Nilekani says. “But if someone had told you 10 years ago that there would be 700 million mobile phones in this country today, you’d say he was smoking something.”

The technological problems may pale compared to the potential civil liberties issues. Anti-Aadhaar protesters showed up at Nilekani’s January speech at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. Several anti-Aadhaar websites have sprung up. And members of parliament and prominent intellectuals have criticized the whole idea. (A Christian sect even denounced it as a cover for introducing the number of the Beast.)

Technically, Aadhaar is voluntary. No one is obligated to get scanned into the system. But that’s like saying no American is obligated to get a Social Security number. In practice, once the Aadhaar system really takes hold, it will be extremely difficult for anyone to function without being part of it. “I find it obnoxious and frightening,” says Aruna Roy, one of India’s most respected advocates for the poor (and, like Nilekani, one of Time’s 100 most influential people). India, she points out, is a country where people have many times been targeted for discrimination and violence because of their religion or caste.

Earlier this year, privacy concerns scuttled an effort to give every citizen of the United Kingdom a biometric ID card, and similar worries have slowed ID plans in Canada and Australia. “But the intentions were very different. It comes more from a security and surveillance perspective,” Nilekani says. “Many of these countries already have ID. In our situation, our whole focus is on delivering benefits to people. It’s all about making your life easier.”

The Unique Identification Authority is very deliberately not collecting information on anyone’s race or caste. But local governments and other agencies subcontracted to collect data are permitted to ask questions about race or caste and link the information they harvest to the respondent’s Aadhaar number. In Gagenahalli, for instance, agents asked villagers several extra questions about their economic conditions that the Karnataka state government requested. “I haven’t seen any agencies asking for caste or religion, but the fact that they can seems problematic,” admits a midlevel Aadhaar official who asked to remain anonymous. And while the agency has pledged not to share its data with security services or other government agencies, “if they want to, they can,” says Delhi human rights lawyer Usha Ramanathan. “All that information is in the hands of the state.” It’s not an unreasonable concern; in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks, security is a major preoccupation in India. Armed guards, x-ray machines, and metal detectors are standard features at the entrances of big hotels, shopping centers, and even Delhi subway stations. Police officials have told Indian newspapers that they would love to use Aadhaar numbers to help catch criminals. And, in fact, some of the agency’s own publicly available planning documents mention the system’s potential usefulness for security functions. “We would share data for national security purposes,” Nilekani admits. “But there will be processes for that so you have checks and balances.” Every official I speak with, from Nilekani on down, seems impatient when I bring up this issue. They breezily remind me that there’s an electronic data privacy bill before parliament—as though the mere fact that the government is thinking about the issue is enough.

For supporters, the bottom line is simple: The upsides beat the downsides. “Any new technology has potential risks,” Nilekani says. “Your mobile phone can be tapped and tracked. One could argue we already have a surveillance state because of that. But does that mean we should stop making mobile phones? When you have hundreds of millions of people who are not getting access to basic services, isn’t that more important than some imagined risk?”

Indeed, Kiran, the mother of three at the Mongolpuri enrollment station, actively wants the government to have a record of her and her children. She’s a bit mystified when I ask if the idea worries her. If you’ve never read a newspaper, let alone fretted over your Facebook privacy settings, the question of whether the government might abuse your digital data must seem pretty abstract—especially when you compare it with the benefits the government is offering.

The first thing Kiran plans to use her Aadhaar number for, she says, is to obtain a city government card that will entitle her to subsidized groceries. “I’ve tried very hard to get one before, but they wouldn’t give it to me because I couldn’t prove I live in Delhi,” she says. Having that proof will take some other stress off her mind, too. She’s constantly afraid the police will order non-Delhi residents to leave the overcrowded slum, but now she has something to show them if they do.

Her three children come running up, fresh from having their own irises scanned. They’re excitedly waving their receipts for the numbers that will be attached to them for the rest of their lives. “It was fun!” 7-year-old Sadar says. “It wasn’t scary at all.”

Vince Beiser (@vincelb) wrote about activists combating Chinese online censorship in issue 18.11.