Eminent social scientist Usha Ramnathan will deliver a talk on the controversial UID project of Government of India at Lohia Academy in Bhubaneswar at 10.30 a.m. on September 16.
Friday, December 28, 2012
2742 - Jharkhand to be ‘pilot State’ for UID
FRIDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2012 17:40 PNS | RANCHI HITS: 7
inShare
Jharkhand has been selected as ‘Pilot State’ for implementing use of Unique Identification (UID) cards for delivering welfare schemes of Government. The State aims to have every person this card till 2013.
In the first phase of registration 83,56,657 people were enrolled against which 52,48,521 have been issued the cards. The second phase of enrolment has started in June this year. There are more than 2 crore people who have still not enrolled themselves.
In a meeting with Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Chairperson Nandan Nilekani and Director General RS Sharma at Ranchi Chief Minister Arjun Munda stressed on the need of speeding up the process of enrolment.
Nilekani said, “The process of enrolment and issuing the cards could be achieved in stipulated time if 1 lakh people are enrolled per day at 2,000 enrolment centers across the State.”
He further said that Jharkhand would be first state to achieve hundred percent enrolments. “These cards will streamline the demographic database of the state population and facilitate the delivery of various Government run schemes,” he added.
The CM stressed that there was a need for monitoring the districts where enrolment ratios were low. “Constitute special task force speeding up the process,” CM said while directing Development Commissioner to coordinate efforts with all Divisional Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner for achieving the goal of hundred percent enrolment by 2013.
The CM opined that these cards could be instrumental in ensuring targeted delivery of welfare schemes. He directed the officials to use database collected through these cards for delivering welfare schemes in the districts where comparatively good number people own the cards.
Munda also directed other district officials to set targets for completing enrolment under stipulated period. “The district that achieves hundred percent enrolments first will be awarded by the State,” he said.
UIDAI Chief said that the State Government should make efforts to ensure that UID cards are used for delivering its services and assured all technical help to the State in that regard.
2741 - Andhra Pradesh links PDS to Aadhaar card
Hyderabad, Sep 8, 2012, DHNS:
Ration card holders can draw their ration by giving their fingerprints
In first such experiment in the country, the ration shops in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh have begun distribution of essential commodities to the beneficiaries by taking their fingerprints and tallying them with their “Aadhaar” card numbers.
The Aadhaar-linked ration distribution, launched as a pilot project in 47 ration shops in the coastal district, is expected to ensure that the subsidised commodities reached the genuine beneficiaries and also aims to cut down on the procedures and paper work.
The ration card holders can draw their monthly ration by giving their fingerprints. The unique electronic equipment known as “PDS-point of sale” would screen the fingerprints of the beneficiaries online and accord clearance. It does not require internet connection as it uses GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) screen. The fingerprints of the card holder will be compared with the Aadhaar number data to authenticate the identity.
The equipment is integrated with high quality optical sensor, printer, GRPS connectivity and smart card interface. Along with fingerprint identification, it also issues two printed ration receipts.
It enables the beneficiary to take delivery of the ration at any ration shop in the state through online portability facility, the officials said.
“After completing enrolment of ‘Aadhaar’ data close to 99 per cent, the East Godavari district was given the task of linking the public distribution system with the data collected through the Unique Identity (UID) exercise,” District Collector Neethu Kumari said.
In AP, each BPL family is entitled to a monthly quota of 35 kg of rice from fair price shop at a subsidised price of Rs 1 per kg. Though 50 districts have been selected across the country for the pilot project, East Godavari is the first district to implement it successfully.
Initially, the impressions of all the ten fingers are being collected, from which the device detects the ‘best finger’ to access the ‘Aadhaar’ data. Any member from the cardholder’s family can draw the monthly ration, provided he or she is enrolled for the UID (Unique Identity) project.
The Aadhaar-linked ration distribution, launched as a pilot project in 47 ration shops in the coastal district, is expected to ensure that the subsidised commodities reached the genuine beneficiaries and also aims to cut down on the procedures and paper work.
The ration card holders can draw their monthly ration by giving their fingerprints. The unique electronic equipment known as “PDS-point of sale” would screen the fingerprints of the beneficiaries online and accord clearance. It does not require internet connection as it uses GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) screen. The fingerprints of the card holder will be compared with the Aadhaar number data to authenticate the identity.
The equipment is integrated with high quality optical sensor, printer, GRPS connectivity and smart card interface. Along with fingerprint identification, it also issues two printed ration receipts.
It enables the beneficiary to take delivery of the ration at any ration shop in the state through online portability facility, the officials said.
“After completing enrolment of ‘Aadhaar’ data close to 99 per cent, the East Godavari district was given the task of linking the public distribution system with the data collected through the Unique Identity (UID) exercise,” District Collector Neethu Kumari said.
In AP, each BPL family is entitled to a monthly quota of 35 kg of rice from fair price shop at a subsidised price of Rs 1 per kg. Though 50 districts have been selected across the country for the pilot project, East Godavari is the first district to implement it successfully.
Initially, the impressions of all the ten fingers are being collected, from which the device detects the ‘best finger’ to access the ‘Aadhaar’ data. Any member from the cardholder’s family can draw the monthly ration, provided he or she is enrolled for the UID (Unique Identity) project.
2740 - P Sainath's remarks at the public meeting organised by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis:
P Sainath's remarks at the public meeting organised by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis:
(He says, at the end of 45 minutes, that he hasn't yet touched upon a whole bunch of security issues, naming some of the more well-known civil/violent agitations, and then goes on)
Oh yeah, I think that we are also involved in a number of other active processes that undermine [your] our insecurity, including the UID. OK. By the way, that outsourced biometric work. You can buy that data on the streets of Mumbai. It's already made its way there. What sort of national security will you have when your biometric data is up for grabs all around the planet? You outsourced it to subcontractors who have subcontracted it to further people. It's now available on the streets of Mumbai, biometric data.
Another thing let me tell you about this stupid, stupid idea. Anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world, there is no-one who has made a success of the UID type of system. The UK started this kind of national ID system, abandoned it in four months. Australia, it collapsed at the discussion stage. No other country has made a success of it, one, and no-one claims that it is is technologically infallible, and three, very importantly, in any society, there is 5 % to 7 % of the population that does not have any fingerprints. In India, that is 15% +, because of agricultural labour: they do not have fingerprints. OK? The washerwomen, they do not have fingerprints. A lot of professions in India: and those are the very people who will get de-accessed from your public distribution system, using the UID. The very people who need your public distribution system, the very people who need your social sector benefits, these are the very people who will be excluded from it, because they don't have fingerprints. You are asking for big, big trouble, with this project.
2739 - Mistakes in understanding border issues has led to disputes
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2738 - Criminals can hide data in plain sight
27 August 2012 Last updated at 23:04 GMT
Viewpoint: Criminals can hide data in plain sight
By Prof Alan Woodward Department of Computing, University of Surrey
It may not look like it but this promotional image of James Bond has been treated to contain a message hidden within it
Is there a hidden threat right under our noses? Each day billions of messages are sent over the internet.
Not surprisingly, some contain very sensitive information and much effort goes into making sure these messages are unreadable by anyone other than the intended recipients.
This is the essence of cryptography. But, there is another option: hiding messages in plain sight, the electronic equivalent of invisible ink.
We can think of all messages as falling into one of three categories:
- "Sense" - where the message is sent "in the clear" and anyone intercepting the data can read it as easily as a valid recipient.
- "Nonsense" - where the intercepted data is turned into nonsense so that only someone with the right key can convert the message back from nonsense to sense. This is cryptography.
- "Missense" - where the message is embedded in some innocuous looking data so that no one would suspect there was a hidden message. This is known as steganography.
Although you don't realise it, you are probably using steganography already in your everyday electronic lives as it is used extensively to "digitally watermark" electronic data with information such as the copyright owner.
Encoding James Bond
The James Bond image had text hidden within it using a piece of free sofware easily found on the internet.
Digital images in many formats can have the data that describes each element of the picture altered very slightly without perceptible changes to the image.
Suppose you changed on only one "bit" in each element in order to hide data: without the original for comparison no-one would notice anything unusual.
When you know which elements to look at and which bits were changed you can extract the hidden data and hence you secret message.
In case you are wondering, the text hidden inside the image reads: "This is a secret message that I want no-one to read."
New technologies have emerged that are capable of holding considerable amounts of information, whilst having no perceptible effect on the object being digitally watermarked. Photographs, music and even e-books all use forms of this technology, as a deterrent to bootleggers.
Missing missense
Whilst digital watermarks are intended to hold information such as copyright data, the techniques can also be used to embed hidden messages in digital objects, and this poses a problem for any law enforcement agencies trying to conduct surveillance.
If something is sent "in the clear", you can set up filters to look or words of interest and use those to trigger a closer look at the data in question.
Even better if something that looks like nonsense. It is quite likely to be of interest. After all if someone has gone to all the trouble of encrypting data to make it look like nonsense then you can assume that it is something the sender values, and hence something worth paying much closer attention to.
However, anything that is sent as "missense" is highly likely to be missed, as it will look to all the world like some innocent piece of data.
It is the classic conjuring trick of misdirection. This matters in the modern world as the volumes of data that any eavesdropper has to sift through are vast.
Spotting "missense" might involve combing through a files' data rather than looking at what it appears to show
No-one can analyse every piece of data that could potentially be captured and so if a piece of data looks like, say, a picture but actually it contains a secret hidden document, no-one will know to conduct further analysis on that picture.
Governments and the military are not the only ones who want to pass messages securely.
Criminal code
Obvious candidates are terrorist groups and organised crime. Those who may have reason to think they may be under surveillance may find steganography very appealing, as such messages need not be passed using simple email.
Imagine, for example, someone posting apparently innocent photographs on a social media site, but the item actually contains the secret message.
The whole world can see it but only those who know where to look can see the intended message.
And what about a disgruntled employee using his/her work email to send a picture of the children to a friend but actually they are shipping out your most commercially sensitive information?
Your intellectual capital could be disappearing before your eyes and you'd never know it even if you read all of their emails.
Reading between the letters
It is sometimes difficult to know even what type of object can hide a message. Some very innovative forms have emerged in recent years.
“I think it inevitable that the bad guys on the internet are already using these techniques. There are freely available tools... and these tools continue to advance”
One of those I found most impressive was where the spacing of letters on a web page varied very subtly but in such a way that it conveyed hidden messages. You could read the pages quite normally and learn all about the tourist spot or whatever was being described, but all along you were looking at hidden data that you didn't recognise as such.
There is also a way of having the best of both worlds: encrypt a secret and then embed it using steganography. In this way, even if the hidden message was detected, it could not be read.
However, whilst the research into digital watermarking continues to mature, the research into detection of hidden messages is still in its infancy.
Decoding encrypted messages (so called cryptanalysis) has long been studied, with efforts such as those at Bletchley Park during World War II being rightly celebrated.
Detection of hidden messages - known as steganalysis - has no such pedigree. In part this is because various studies of large data sets on the internet failed to detect the use of steganography, and so it is not considered a threat. But, if the hiding techniques used were advanced enough, the immaturity of the detection techniques means that these studies were fundamentally flawed.
So will message hiding ever be widely used? I think it inevitable that the bad guys on the internet are already using these techniques.
There are freely available tools to enable you to do all of what I have described above, and these tools continue to advance.
What is required is proper funding of the detection techniques, or at the minimum, some more reliable method of determining if steganography is being used for hiding messages en masse, if we are to have a proper understanding of the threat.
Alan Woodward is a visiting professor at the University of Surrey's department of computing. He has worked for the UK government and still provides advice on issues including cybersecurity, covert communications and forensic computing.
2737 - Biometrics Uncover 825,000 ID Inconsistencies in DHS Database
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2012
Many of the situations involved women who legally altered their names. “We found that nearly 400,000 records for women have different last names for the same first name, date of birth and [fingerprint identification number],” he wrote. “These instances are likely women who changed their names after a marriage.”
During the study, auditors examined records covering 1998 through 2011.
Most of the time, US-VISIT personnel try to resolve cases in which people who appear to be one and the same have different information listed in records, the auditors found. The researchers are not specifically targeting scams, Deffer explained. Accidental typos, the fact that various immigration-related agencies use incompatible data formats and other keying mistakes are factors they look for when probing mismatches. During the course of typical procedures, US-VISIT has picked up on only two instances of fraud, agency officials reported to the IG.
The enormity of the conflicting data, however, may obscure actual fraud. “These inconsistencies can make it difficult to distinguish between data entry errors and individuals potentially committing identity fraud,” he wrote.
As they grow and age databases can get really junked-up. Biometrics, in this case fingerprint biometrics, can be extremely helpful in maintaining their integrity. The database involved here is the on maintained by the US Department of Homeland Security US-VISIT program. It contains (wait for it) information, including a fingerprint, on all visitors to the US. The fingerprint has been the linchpin of the audit that discovered 825,000 database errors because it is the only piece of truly unique and durable, personal information stored.
Before automated fingerprint ID systems (AFIS), combinations of data were used to reduce ID error rates to some reasonable approximation of zero. While names, birth dates, and other descriptors aren't unique, multiplying them together works pretty well for a while. Working against this system are legal name changes and human typographical errors in data entry which have the database effect of creating a whole new person, which runs counter to the reasons for keeping such a database in the first place.
See Biometric "Fix" Identity which takes on this issue from the angle of intentional fraud.
2735 - No salary after October for govt employees without Aadhaar card - TOI
Jaideep Deogharia, TNN Aug 28, 2012, 06.41AM IST
RANCHI: Several months after the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) started its project for enrollment and distribution of Aadhaar cards to citizens in Jharkhand, the state government has now decided to make it mandatory for payment of salary and pension to state employees. The move seems to have given the necessary impetus to the enrolment process which was, otherwise, slow during the second phase.
Long queues could be seen at the permanent enrollment centres on Monday who arrived here after obtaining information about the functioning of permanent centres from various sources. The process of enrollment that was being carried out through agencies and by holding camps in different parts of the state got good response of people and the registrars (government representatives) along with UIDAI office in Jharkhand completed the target of enrolling 80 lakh people by January 2012 which was well ahead of the target set for March 31.
The process became slow once UIDAI decided to withhold the process once the target was completed. It was after launch of second phase in April 2012 that the process of the enrollment progressed at a slow pace.
At present nine permanent counters for enrollment and collection of biometric details are functioning in Ranchi district further subdivided into urban and rural pockets. For Ranchi urban four centres -- one each at General Post Office, Ranchi, GPO Doranda, AG office Doranda and at Commerce Tower, main road -- are operational. Under urban category two centres for Namkom -- one at post office at NIFFT campus, Hatia and another at post office at Namkom Bazar, whereas for Kanke -- one centre on Ranchi University campus is operational. For the rural populace one centre each has been opened at Knke and Silli.
Sunil Kumar Baxi, In-charge at the commerce tower enrollment centre, said the rate of enrollment was slow initially but it picked pace since August 25. "We enrolled 107 people since the centre became operational on August 4 and on Monday as many as 100 people came for enrollment," he said. Admitting that the level of awareness about the enrollment centres, particularly in the wake of lack of advertisement or dissemination of required information, Baxi said people not having access to internet are facing trouble. "Many of them come to inquire what formalities they have to fulfil to get enrolled," he said.
Officials at UIDAI office here said details about Aadhaar enrollment were available on the official website of UIDAI. "A person can go to any authorized Aadhaar enrollment centre anywhere in India with an identity and address proof. UIDAI process accepts 18 documents as proof of identity and 33 documents as proof of address," the official said.
2734 - Part 1 – Citizenship and its archive today: the intensely duplicated de-duplicate
Posted on August 26, 2012
Who or what is the subject of contemporary identity, and what politics ensue in the face of this emergent subject? This question, is the central one that this experiment cum blog seems to find itself addressing.
Zipless encounters with the identification establishment
Before I begin with a comment I will stretch out over two or more posts, I might for this entry recount a conversation I had with a fellow scholar this past week, who was telling me of her experience in signing up for the UID/Aadhaar card. What made it so easy, she said, was that I did not need to bring any documents.
Look how easy!: Bihar leaders show their UID registration papers
Her experience runs against many of the reports of UID registration covered in news articles and elsewhere. For the moment and taking her account seriously, let me presume that the question of using biometrics, big data, and the rationalized and deterritorialized reorganization of welfare to generate trust—the promise of UID in a nutshell—itself enters into a world in which preexisting ecologies of risk and trustworthiness produce differing modes of entrance into UID’s promise.
In the case of this one person, the mode of entrance was entirely friction-free. To borrow a favorite adjective from Erica Jong, it appeared “zipless.”
In the case of this one person, the mode of entrance was entirely friction-free. To borrow a favorite adjective from Erica Jong, it appeared “zipless.”
I am presuming that such zipless encounters are not evenly distributed. But suspending for the moment my hermeneutic of suspicion, the social fact (if that is what it is) of the ease of entrance into Aadhaar is worth thinking with. I will be reading both Akhil Gupta‘s and Matthew Hull‘s recent books in the next few weeks. Both differently attend to the relation of bureaucracy to the materiality and force of the document, extending a conversation Annaliese Riles, Laura Bear, and Emma Tarlo among others have engendered. But the claim advanced to me, by and for a certain kind of subject, was for a relation to entitlement and belonging that required no documents. Whatever its relation to actual practice, as such the claim bears attention.
This scholar made two other points. First, she noted that such zipless ease could be manipulated. It is fine for people like you and I, she said, and I should note that these words are my reconstruction of a conversation some hours after it took place, but others could create duplicate numbers. Her use of the duplicate was perhaps a response to my own mention, earlier, of my growing interest in de-duplication as a mode of governance.
If I am correct in reading the implicit theory of value and the state in the project of Aadhaar as a dual diagnosis of ‘duplication from above’ [the redirection of the common wealth by the powerful through the creation of phantom populations that receive entitlement monies or materials] and ‘duplication from below’ [the redirection of the common wealth by the 'common man' or janata manipulating the varied identities given one by the state], then taking this scholar’s concern seriously produces a middle-subject [there must be some useful expression of this in German, say] that can be trusted not to duplicate itself and that can, therefore, be granted ID ziplessly. Or rather, all subjects may variably make claims on their status as such a middle-subject.
My interlocutor made another point. The agency that registered her, pleasant and unencumbered by documents though it was, could answer few of her questions. Simply put, its employees seemed to have little understanding of the UID number or its use. Their sphere of competence focused on the technical practice of registration and not the afterlife of that enrollment.
For the moment, and as with the earlier points with awareness of the limits of a single conversation, we might define what is at stake here as a particular temporality of enrollment or registration. Aadhaar, that is, may seem to bear a particular relation to the present, with its relation to what after Jane Guyer I will term the near future in question.
If the scholar suggested the limit to a unitary process of enrollment, given the distinction between the middle-subject (always already de-duplicated) and the duplicating, cheating subject, we might attend to how the figure of the Universal Subject of “Universal ID,” the basis ["aadhaar"] of the promise of a national telos of fairness, reason, and wealth, may always already contain within itself a doubling or duplication, a split subject that will threaten to defeat the very project of universalizing, de-duplicating technology.
2733 - 4 govt schemes to be linked to UID
In a significant move, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Saturday agreed, in principle, to link four schemes of the Karnataka government to Aadhaar cards to be issued in 21 districts from October this year. After an in-camera meeting between UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani and Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar at ‘Krishna’, the CM’s home office here on Saturday, source disclosed that Mr Nilekani was open to Mr Shettar’s suggestion to make
Aadhaar card an eligilibility criterion for issuing ration cards, pension schemes, scholarship schemes and housing schemes.
“The Aadhaar card will reduce duplication and optimise distribution of benefits to targeted beneficiaries and minimize scope for fraud”, the source explained. The UIDAI will launch its phase-II operation of issuance of Aadhaar cards from October in 21 districts in the state. The source also pointed out that Mr Nilekeni was not happy with the progress in distribution of Aadhaar cards in Dharwad district which is one of the three prominent districts identified for the launch of pilot project in the state. “Mr Nilekeni was, however, happy with enrolments in Mysore and Tumkur districts, which have achieved 95 and 93 per cent of enrolments, respectively” the source said.
As many as 1.41 crore people were covered under the Aadhaar enrolment programme in the state and remaining will be covered in a phased manner. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Mr Shettar assured that the State will extend full co-operation to the Aadhaar programme. “Be it in the form of financial support or in any other form, the state government will provide all help to the UIDAI”, he noted.
2732 - Store and deliver, governments tell web firms
Web exclusive
Forget about data protection – spies are demanding our elected leaders and private companies serve up everything we do online. Robin Tudge reports.
Truthout.org under a CC Licence
Freedom from warrantless, arbitrary searches and all-pervasive state surveillance and suspicion were defining principles of life for citizens in the West, or so one might naively once have thought. But so much of our modern lives is spent online, and this year, Australia, Canada, Britain and the US have seen a curiously coincidental effort to have the motherlode of surveillance laws thrust upon their peoples, with private companies bade to store and surrender every byte of online data to state spies, on demand, without a warrant.
As the democracy activist group GetUp! Action for Australia explains, Australia’s government has been seeking legal changes which will require communications companies to keep all web users’ data, emails and social media traffic for up to two years, to be given up, along with any passwords, on pain of imprisonment, to the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Terrifyingly, the ASIO was also to be given free hand to remotely access people’s computers and ‘legally modify, delete or add files’, without a warrant, if ASIO thought your computer was linked, for example through an open wi-fi connection, to any other computers under investigation.
Licence to spill
One suspects the new law would only have legalized what ASIO already does, and it already has pretty broad licence. Under part 13 of Australia’s 1997 Telecommunications Act, providers can disclose to law enforcement agencies users’ data if it is ‘reasonably necessary’ to enforce a law, or there is a warrant to do so – a pretty standard legal cop-out from data protection seen across Western states, but at least there is a statutory demand for some kind of legal justification for disclosures. But also under part 13, warrantless disclosures are permitted, ‘where the disclosure is made to ASIO for the performance of its functions’.1 As ASIO’s primary function is surveillance, giving data to ASIO spies is self-justifying – enabling ASIO’s spies to spy on people is OK because that is what ASIO does.2
This year, Australia, Canada, Britain and the US have seen a curiously coincidental effort to have the motherlode of surveillance laws thrust upon their peoples
One might think ASIO is literally a law unto itself; however, following much public protest – led by GetUp! – against giving ASIO even more powers, on 10 August Australia’s attorney-general Nicola Roxon deferred putting the proposals to parliament until after the next election. For that she duly incurred the wrath of the security services,3 with a senior (and anonymous) national security official calling the government ‘risk adverse’ with little appetite ‘for anything that attracts controversy’.4 This fits the trend of the West’s one-time super-secret intelligence agencies now openly criticizing elected governments. Whereas once only right-wing political opponents sought to capitalize, calling their opponent softs on terror, now our spies do so freely.
Ticking bomb fear tactics
The proposals themselves bore striking resemblance to other surveillance laws being wielded elsewhere. In Canada earlier this year, police backed the ‘Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act’ that sought to have telecommunications providers give them subscriber data on demand, without a warrant, on the grounds that they needed such data quickly to stop children being groomed over the internet and suicidal people killing themselves. Funnily enough, while children and paedophiles often loom large in arguments supporting the set-up of all-invasive surveillance states for these children to grow up in, the bill did not mention children beyond its title, while the touchy-feely concern for suicidal people was a new twist on the ‘ticking bomb’ fear tactic that accompanies so much other draconian legislation.5 The bill was the latest attempt of many since 1999 to secure ‘lawful access’ and failed like the others, not least because, as federal deputy privacy commissioner Chantal Bernier said, the law ‘could impact any law-abiding Canadian citizen’ with its demolition of privacy and the presumption of innocence.
The Pentagon has ‘formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain in warfare’
However, Canada’s Public Safety minister Vic Toews denounced one critic of the bill, saying: ‘He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.’ And this remark was curiously echoed by Home Secretary Theresa May to opponents to Britain’s 2012 Communications Act bill (a.k.a. the ‘Snoopers charter’ or ‘mass surveillance bill’) that demands companies store all users’ telecom and online data so the police and agencies can sniff through everyone’s records, whenever, without a warrant. May dismissed criticism that the bill binned fundamental rights such as living free from arbitrary state suspicion and surveillance, or the right to hold investigators to account and their acts to judicial scrutiny, arguing that the only freedom being defended was that of ‘criminals, terrorists and paedophiles’. The bill will recommence its churn through Parliament after the summer recess.
One woman's protest against Vic Toews and the internet bills. Caelie Frampton under a CC Licence
Battle of the bills
In the US, a veritable battle of bills is going on. Following the Stop Online Piracy Act, which allows the US to shut down entire internet domains and censor free speech in the name of enforcing copyright laws, in April the House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) bill, giving more cover to private companies when sharing individuals’ private and personal data and communications with the government, and also better enabling them to monitor individuals’ web usage, backed, tellingly, by Microsoft and Facebook. The Senate is supposedly against it, and even were it passed President Obama may veto it. But Obama’s record on civil rights and liberties includes having renewed the Patriot Act, keeping Guantanamó open and taking execution by drone to a new level. Obama backed Joe Liebermann’s 200-page Cybersecurity Act, designed to defend the US’ major computer networks and infrastructure against cyber attacks, but meanwhile giving greater legal impunity to companies to spy on web users – and share their data with the government.6 In early August, Republicans led the Senate vote down of this bill, much to Obama’s chagrin. But don’t thank the GOP for defending liberty. Their own SECURE IT Act of 2012 would enable and incentivise greater commercial and state surveillance of web usage – without establishing any government regulation or standard for security to cover infrastructure. The bill is currently batting around Congress.
Paranoid perception
Too often, our public servants – elected to safeguard our rights – end up serving the seedy agendas of state spies on the permanent public payroll
It seems both the GOP and Democrats have become engrossed in stopping the other taking the legislative credit for fulfilling the real agenda set by the Pentagon, which has ‘formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain in warfare.’ This global domain, where we play on Facebook, socialize, pay tax or bank online, is just another theatre of war where we are all potential victims to any blow struck anytime from anywhere. Too often, our public servants – elected to safeguard our rights – end up serving the seedy agendas of state spies on the permanent public payroll; they consider us all equally tooled up as potential cyber enemies. So they seek to fight this paranoid perception by demolishing our real rights, with the legalized connivance of private companies. If we kick up enough we can remind politicians who they really serve. But we have to keep at it, time and time again.
Robin Tudge is a journalist and the author of the No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance. Robin is also the Newcastle co-ordinator for NO2ID.
2731- Aadhaar letters lost: Phase I was tough, says India Post
Geeta Gupta : New Delhi, Sat Aug 25 2012, 00:13 hrs
With the Delhi government voicing concern over loss of Aadhaar letters during transit — Newsline reported many are being dumped in bulk at certain places — India Post, the designated carrier for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), has acknowledged that it struggled to deal with bulk orders during Phase I of the project owing to shortage of manpower and equipment.
The postal department, which was responsible for printing, dispatch and delivery of Aadhaar numbers, said the printing work has been outsourced and it will now only dispatch and deliver under Phase II.
Y P S Mohan, Chief General Manager (Business Development and Marketing Directorate), Department of Posts, told Newsline there were problems and shortage of resources “but Phase II will be a smooth sail”.
“We are very low on manpower and cities have expanded very fast. If a postman had a 3-km area under him, now the same has increased to 10-km or more.”
Mohan said the UIDAI had initially placed an order for printing 25 lakh letters in 2010. These were printed in Delhi and Kolkata.
“The UIDAI articles is a one-off project which will get over in another couple of years. But it was a very big challenge for us. Enrolment started on a large scale in 2011 and we had the task of printing, dispatch and delivery of 2.5 crore speed posts a month. We have handled a maximum of 11 lakh articles in a single day. But our capacity was less, we were ill-equipped to take up such mass printing, and the UIDAI understood that. It was then decided to outsource printing. From January 2012 onward, we have been able to clear our backlog,” Mohan said.
Given that the official time limit for delivery of speed post is seven days, Mohan said postmen have been asked to devote extra time. “Since the beat areas have expanded and there are too many letters to be delivered, post offices have been asked to ensure accuracy and take extra time if needed,” he said.
Meanwhile, UIDAI chairperson Nandan Nilekani met Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Wednesday and proposed implementation of the Aadhaar-based “business correspondent (BC)” model in Delhi, so far implemented in rural areas to facilitate doorstep banking services to workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.
Under this model, accredited agents provide doorstep banking services using a micro-ATM. People use their Aadhaar-enabled bank accounts and the portable ATMs work with biometric authentication as identification proof.
A senior government official said: “The Chief Minister has given a go ahead that all major social security schemes in Delhi, Delhi Annashree Yojna to begin with, be primarily based on Aadhaar.” Officials of the UIDAI said modalities of the model will be worked out to help the Delhi government in implementing schemes.
Sujata Chaturvedi, Deputy Director General of UIDAI’s Delhi zone, said: “The idea behind implementation of the BC model here is to enable the Delhi government in implementing various social security schemes more effectively. Modalities of working out this model in Delhi are still being worked out in consultation with other stakeholders. While the Delhi government will lead the schemes, UIDAI will provide support services with the use of Aadhaar, like direct cash transfers to beneficiaries.”
2730 - Empowering the poor: Abandon the broken model
Empowering the poor: Abandon the broken model
Cash transfers and vouchers empower the beneficiary rather than the provider, and they reduce leakage
Arvind Panagariya
Professor of Economics and Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy
Columbia University
THE TIMES OF INDIA
Aug 25, 2012, 12.00AM IST
Large increases in revenues, made possible by accelerated growth, have allowed the UPA government to rapidly expand redistribution programmes — distribution of subsidised foodgrain, free elementary education, rural health and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).
But only a small fraction of the benefits of these programmes actually reaches the intended beneficiaries. Leakages along various elaborate government distribution chains are endemic. In sharp contrast to China, the government in India is hopelessly ineffective and inefficient at the delivery of social benefits.
Thus, for example, according to the 11th five-year Plan (Table 4.1.8), 54% of the offtake from the stocks of the Food Corporation of India (FCI) never made it to the beneficiaries in the year 2004-05. On top of that, a large volume of FCI grain stored in the open was washed away by rains, devoured by pests or stolen.
Similar leakages characterise NREGS, with one-third to a half of the stipulated wages skimmed off in bribes paid to whole hierarchy of staff going as far up as the block level. In public healthcare, providers are often absent from sub-centres, public health centres and community health centres, forcing 80% of the patients to seek private providers for non-hospitalised healthcare. Rampant teacher absenteeism in public schools is leading to a similar exit to private schools.
Decades of efforts to plug the leakages along government supply chains have failed to improve matters. Indeed, evidence points to increased, not reduced, leakage over time. Therefore, the time has come for the government and many NGOs, who themselves materially benefit from being a part of the corrupt and inefficient distribution chains, to drop the pretense that the system can be made functional by fixing this or that flaw.
Fifty years of misery borne by the public in the hope that the system can be fixed should be enough. Genuine alternatives that do justice to the beneficiaries and taxpayers whose valuable income the government and NGOs squander must now be tried.
There are at least two delivery mechanisms that can potentially deliver goods and services at a lower cost. The first is a voucher that allows its holder to buy the specified good or service at subsidised price from a public or private provider of his choice. The second is direct cash transfer.
Under the first option, the government gives the beneficiary a voucher that he or she can use to buy the specified commodity (foodgrain) or service (enrolment in school or healthcare) from a provider of his choice at subsidised prices. The provider can then exchange the voucher for cash to the extent of the subsidy from the government. The key to fostering efficiency under this scheme is to require the public providers to fully recover their costs and compete against private providers. This is not unlike public sector companies in civil aviation and telecommunications and banks that must compete with their private sector counterparts.
Under the second option, the government gives cash directly to the beneficiary who decides precisely how he will spend the income so received. The transfer can, of course, be conditioned on certain actions by the recipient such as sending children under 14 to school and regular health check-ups.
Critics often deride cash transfers on the ground that the beneficiary might not spend them on the goods and services for which they are intended and may even shell them on alcohol and gambling. But this same fate can also meet in-kind transfers as currently practised. Subsidised foodgrain received through public distribution system can be sold for cash in the open market and the cash used to buy alcohol. Subsidised services are not subject to similar conversion but they too free up the other income of the beneficiary, allowing him to indulge into his favourite consumption. Transfers to individuals are just as fungible as foreign aid to governments.
Two factors make cash transfers and vouchers superior to the current system. First, they empower the beneficiary rather than the provider. Today, the beneficiary is at the mercy of the public distribution shop. Even under NREGS, he must play to the tune of this or that official. Just calling something "guarantee" or "right" does not turn it into one. But cash transfer and vouchers make the beneficiary truly the king with the provider, whether private or public, playing to his tune.
Second, cash transfers and vouchers reduce leakage. At least the evidence from the rare existing cash transfer schemes in India is highly encouraging. A careful recent study finds that 96% of the benefits intended for widows and elderly women in Karnataka and 93% of those in Rajasthan went to the intended beneficiaries. Leakages involving bribes were tiny. With the proliferation of banking and modern technology, cash transfers can be put from a central government office literally directly into the hands of the beneficiary with virtually no leakages.
If the UPA and NGOs are serious about their rhetoric of empowering and enriching the poor rather than themselves, they should wholeheartedly go for cash transfers for food, shelter, clothing and routine healthcare; vouchers for elementary education; and subsidised insurance, which is a form of voucher, for treatment of major illnesses.
These measures can curb corruption and benefit the poor as no Lokpal or super Lokpal can. Our past experience with the end to the licence-permit raj supports this inference.
Arvind Panagariya is the Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy in the Department of International and Public Affairs and of Economics. He was formerly the chief economist of the Asian Development Bank. He has also advised the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and UNCTAD in various capacities. Panagariya has written or edited more than a half-dozen books, including The Economics of Preferential Trade Agreements with Jagdish Bhagwati (1996); The Global Trading System and Developing Asia with M.G. Quibria and N. Rao (1997); and Lectures on International Trade with J. Bhagwati and T.N. Srinivasan (1998). He is currently an associate editor of Economics and Politics. His technical papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of International Economics, and International Economic Review, while his policy papers have appeared in the World Economy, Journal of International Affairs and Finance and Development.
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2729 - Govt to link crime records with UID project
The move is aimed at making the database easier to handle and better linked to the Crime and Criminals Tracking System
Submitted on 08/22/2012 - 11:28:25 AM
New Delhi: The government has decided to link crime records with the Aadhaar Unique Identity (UID) project. Union Home Ministry has made a provision for linking up the UID or Aadhaar number with crime and criminal tracking system.
In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, Minister of State for Home Affairs, Jitendra Singh said that project will cost Rs 2,000 crore.
He said that linking crime records with the UID will make the data base easier to handle and more acceptable.
The Minister informed that the creation of the National Population Register (NPR) is progressing as envisaged.
In the course of enrolment, if a person indicates that he or she has already been enrolled for Aadhaar, then the biometrics data is not captured by the (NPR).
He said the government is also considering issuing Resident Identity Cards to all residents of age 18 years and above.
—iGovernment Bureau
2728 - BioEnable unveils biometric child ID solution in India
August 22, 2012 -
BioEnable Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering company in the field of advanced electronic automation, identification, and tracking products and services, has announced the launch of Child ID solutions, in Pune, India.
With this improved electronic tracking system, the company aims at reducing the incidents of newborn child swapping and child thefts.
The system is completely based upon cloud networking and provides advanced terminal kits for registration and verification of every new born child in a hospital.
BioEnable’s Child-ID system can be used to feed in the demographic and biometric details of a newborn child and parents. This will help in monitoring and tracking child theft, swapping, or even murder by identifying the parents of a child killed on the basis of footprint, iris, and footprint recognition, and face detection.
With a broader aim of reducing child theft, swapping, and female infanticide, hospitals should register every newborn child’s biometric details.
BioEnable’s onlinesystem and terminal kits also interface with the firm’s fingerprint scanner, which in addition to other identification and tracking devices, can be seamlessly integrated with the Child-ID solution to generate more effective and automated identification.
“There are lot of cases of child theft and newborn child swaps which are either mistakes or intentional. Most of them are either not reported or are never known to parents. All these situations can be controlled with Child ID solutions,” said Dr. Pradeep Bhatia of BioEnable Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
The system is absolutely user-friendly, and can also be extended in the future to directly link with Aadhaar data.
2727 - Lost in transit: UIDAI says cards dumped in bulk in city Express India
Geeta Gupta Posted: Aug 21, 2012 at 0233 hrs
New Delhi The authority in charge of providing a unique identification, or UID, number to every citizen in the country has said several UID cards issued to Delhi residents are being lost in transit by the postal service.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has asked India Post to immediately plug the gaps in the distribution network, Kumar Alok, Deputy Director General for Administration, Logistics and Media, UIDAI, told Newsline.
He said the UIDAI has faced such problems across the country during the project’s first phase “but the issue was bigger in Delhi”.
“We found the problem was more at the post office level, wherein the postmen, out of sheer laziness or whatever reason, dumped the bulk of letters in a single place. We have taken up the matter with India Post and they have reported to have taken action,” Alok said.
A Delhi government official said the Revenue department has received several complaints that residents hadn’t received UID numbers even six months after they were issued.
“There have been several cases where residents or even politicians at times had hoarded all the UID letters dropped off by postmen in their area. It is a very serious issue that the letters, if dispatched by the UIDAI, are not reaching the right people,” the official said.
As the project enters Phase II of distribution, UIDAI officials said they have upgraded capacity and cleared the entire backlog since February this year, having already dispatched at least 18.5 crore letters across the country.
To deal with the delivery problems, Kumar Alok said they would try out e-Aadhaar in Phase II.
“People can electronically print their letters with the UID numbers. We are still working out the modalities and weighing options such as authentication through mobile phone; and at a later stage the office of the sub-divisional magistrates could be allowed to print the cards after a biometric authentication,” Alok said.
He said the UIDAI has faced a major problem in printing and dispatch of Aadhaar numbers in the first phase, which created a huge backlog.
“We figured out the capacity was very low. We have upgraded the printing capacity and the problem has been sorted out now. There is no backlog anymore,” Alok said.
2726 - “1.2 billion credit histories will be available”: Aadhaar and the reformation of the Masses
Posted on August 10, 2012
This is the final post for now introducing the question of financial inclusion. Barring some exciting new topic brought by next week’s events, I would like to turn back to the northeastern states of India and to the question of the migrant in coming days, and then to a close reading of Imagining India, the book by UID head Nandan Nilekani..
Frequent news image: the new account-holder
‘Aadhaar’ the unique identification number, will be aadhaar (support) to banks in not just one but three ways. Not only would it reduce the customer acquisition cost (estimated at Rs 150 an account), it would also reduce customer distribution costs and provide banks credible information for credit risk analysis in the years to come.
Participating in a panel discussion on ‘Profitable models for financial inclusion, agriculture and rural development’, Mr Rajesh Bansal, Assistant Director-General of Unique Identification Authority of India, said that by 2017, nearly 1.2 billion people in the country would be enrolled under Aadhaar.
As Aadhaar gives enrollers a choice to open bank accounts, Indian banks will have access to 1.2 billion customers in the country by the end of 2017, Mr Bansal noted. With this, 1.2 billion credit histories will be available which will in turn help banks to do better credit risk analysis, he said.
Stating that 11 crore people have already enrolled under Aadhaar, he said 3 crore people are being enrolled under the project every month. Around Rs 3-lakh crore of subsidy transfer opportunity is waiting to be unlocked post-Aadhaar, which dwarfs the Rs 22,000 crore currently being spent under National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).
Since 1.2 billion people are expected to get the benefit of Aadhaar in the country, this will be a good KYC (know your customer) for bankers.
Post this panel discussion, Dr Subir Gokarn, Deputy Governor, in his speech, also noted the immense opportunity the ‘financially excluded’ offer.
According to a National Council for Applied Economic Research survey, around 42 per cent of the rural household’s have financial assets in the form of cash. The same proportion in urban areas is 23.4 per cent. This data, despite being dated (survey was done in 2005), would be of similar proportion even today, he opined.
While he used the reference of ‘know your customer’ transition to ‘grow with your customer’ strategy going forward for banks. It is very relevant in case of financial inclusion given largely untapped financial savings and other financial products.
So just a single point. Various state and bank officials promote UID/Aadhaar as an immense resource, a promise, a potential, a source of untapped wealth in the very form of the masses, the long-suffering material of Planned Development, its scary enumeration once a sign of biological catastrophe and the need for swift surgical reform. But here the mass in its enumeration is the source of previously disregarded wealth newly available through the technology of biometrically guaranteed identification. Wealth where before there was waste, a but like the Appalachian landscapes newly given over to the promise of fracking in North America.
Again, it is not simply that Aadhaar creates potential through the registration and formal sector control of previously untapped monetary reserves: but that Aadhaar creates a powerful new information reserve, 1.2 billion credit histories, a double expansion. The mass is reformed both as a source of minimal wealth that in its very massiveness will generate untold potential, and as a source of the radical expansion of information enabling new massifications of risk (sorry!), new control points enabling the presumptively effective management of the risk as poverty becomes the primary national resource for wealth, its marginality a resource for reframing the object of risk (“Know Your Customer”) itself.
Is this a problem? I’m not sure. Win-win situation? I’m not sure.
2725 - “So When Should We Set Up Our Camps?”: The UID – NPR Entente Has Trouble
“So When Should We Set Up Our Camps?”: The UID – NPR Entente Has Trouble
Posted on August 15, 2012
This is the final post for now engaging the January 2012 agreement between promoters of the parallel and competing biometric programs in India, the Security focused NPR and the Financial Liberalization focused UID.
The other biometrics: National Population Register Camp
A recent article posted August 7, 2012, by Sahil Makkar on the website livemint.com [prominently featuring the Wall Street Journal on its masthead], argues that NPR is not doing well and suggests that the terms of the agreement are in question.
If you have been following the career of UID, the news is quite extraordinary. I give the article in full and follow with my usual 3 comments.
NPR likely to be delayed
Decision runs counter to the compromise reached in January that Aadhaar and the NPR weren’t in conflict with each other
New Delhi: The National Population Register (NPR), an identity database being put together by the home ministry, will likely be delayed by at least a year beyond its June 2013 deadline after facing another reversal in its running conflict with the Aadhaar project of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), officials familiar with the development said.
The cabinet headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has directed the home secretary to take steps to avoid duplication of work with UIDAI and to set up NPR camps in states only after the former completes most of its work of collecting biometric data on an additional 400 million people.
The decision effectively runs counter to the compromise reached on 27 January that Aadhaar and the NPR weren’t in conflict with each other and both projects would run simultaneously.
Minutes of the 7 June cabinet meeting, which were released last month, have been reviewed by Mint.
“With this decision, NPR work has been delayed indefinitely,” said a home ministry official who asked not to be identified given the sensitive nature of the issue. “We had earlier targeted to complete NPR by June 2013 but it will be at least delayed by a year or more.”
The cabinet decision could revive the fight between the two identity projects. The core dispute is over which one of the two will collect biometric data. The home ministry’s position before the January compromise was that UIDAI data could not be trusted for security purposes.
Under the truce reached in January, each project was to use the biometric data collected by the other. In case of discrepancies between UIDAI and NPR data, NPR was to prevail. On 7 June, the cabinet directed Nandan Nilekani to accept NPR data, but asked the home ministry to set up NPR camps in states only after UIDAI finishes a majority of its work.
Home ministry officials said that there was no clarity on the word “majority”. UIDAI’s mandate has already been increased from enrolling 200 million people to 600 million, against the wishes of the home ministry and other departments in the Union government, they noted.
UIDAI and the Planning Commission had sought an extension of the former’s mandate after it enrolled 200 million people, its initial target. That resulted in a turf war between NPR and UIDAI.
“The cabinet decision means we cannot set up NPR camps in the states till the time UIDAI completes majority of the work. So when should we set up our camps—when they complete 51% or 60% or 80% of their biometric enrolment work? There is no clarity. State registrars are writing (to) us for directions,” said a second home ministry official who too asked not to be identified.
The 12-digit Aadhaar number was conceived as a unique identity that would be accepted nationally by banks, telcos, oil companies and other government agencies to serve as a tool to better target social spending by making sure that benefits such as subsidies reach the poor for whom they are meant. NPR’s prime mandate is to satisfy security concerns.
Friction between proponents of the two projects persisted despite the January compromise. Then home minister and current finance minister P. Chidambaram wrote in a 1 June letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that UIDAI was not honouring the truce.
“Despite these directions from the government of India, UIDAI is objecting to the conduct of the NPR camps in certain states and is also refusing to accept the biometric data of NPR for de-duplication and generation of (the) Aadhaar numbers,” Chidambaram said in his letter, which has been reviewed by Mint.
Chidambaram said in the letter that the NPR project was almost at a standstill because of the stance taken by UIDAI.
“NPR creation is a statutory requirement and it is backed by legislation. We have to reach every resident in the country as per law even if they have already been covered by the UIDAI. The only difference is that we will not collect the biometrics of the people who have already given the same to UIDAI, but we have to record their other information. People are mandated to visit NPR camps,” the second home ministry official said.
The 27 January compromise hasn’t prevented duplication of biometric data collection, which the government had hoped to avoid. The government will have to spend an additional Rs. 6,000 crore if both NPR and UIDAI insist on collecting biometric data. The second home ministry official admitted it was all but impossible to avoid duplication costs.
The 27 January cabinet decision said the Registrar General of India (RGI), which runs NPR would be free to collect data “as per a schedule of its convenience” in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Andhra Pradesh, Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim and Tripura.
“Now we are only setting up NPR camps in those states like Delhi where UIDAI has almost completed its work. As per the new decision, we are not entering in the state where they are yet to take up work or collecting biometric data,” the first home ministry official said.
The home ministry officials say they are now dependent on state governments for their permission to set up camps because the latter will need to decide whether UIDAI has completed a majority of its work.
A UIDAI spokesperson refused to comment on the issue. “Both UIDAI and RGI are working in accordance with the decision of the government taken from time to time. We are not aware of any difficulty in this regard. We, therefore, have no comments to offer,” R.S. Sharma, UIDAI director general, said in an email response.
UIDAI says it has partnered with state-level registrars for conducting enrolments in the states and that it hopes to enrol another 400 million people in the next 18 months.
Incidentally, the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) is yet to clear the UIDAI’s request for an additional sum of Rs. 5,000 crore for enrolment of the additional 400 million people.
“The proposal is expected to be considered by the EFC shortly,” Sharma said.
UIDAI’s second round of enrolment started on 4 August.
UIDAI claims to have enrolled 200 million people and issued 180 million Aadhaar numbers. It has dispatched 175 million Aadhaar letters. NPR has collected data on 710.25 million and recorded the biometrics of 30.95 million.
3 Points:
1) Duplicates upon duplicates! The painstaking effort of Nandan Nilekani and his team to avoid duplication, their liberal dream of de-duplication, is here explicitly threatened by NPR as a duplicate in multiple senses: two parallel databases, two modes of data collection, two parallel staffs, two norms of contract (see last post) etc. The presumption of Nilekani’s UIDAI is that heretofore the State has failed to realize India’s historical potential (cf. Hegel‘s lectures on the philosophy of history): the social contract has failed, as the condition of livability that the sovereign is to ensure for the citizen-subject is inevitably diverted to an inauthentic “duplicate.” The lessons of rationalized, non-familial corporate governance [i.e., bureaucracy proper to its and the nation's historical potential] and the power of biometrics and big data are brought together to create a database with the power once and for all to de-duplicate the nation.
Bringing India to the end of history: Nilekani as dialectician
But the NPR, from the perspective of the promise of UID, is most likely government as usual, riven with localized “vested interests” forming a nexus with the state and its information-gathering. To allow NPR data to be commensurate with UID data is to ensure the failure of de-duplication, for the NPR data again from this perspective is thought to be always already duplicated: that is, to be formed in the crucible of [corrupt] everyday interest politics.
In this sense, Nilekani and others’ diagnosis of the state as always already corrupt and requiring an uncontaminated intervention is similar to that of the Gandhians and of Nehru, according to Thomas Hansen in his important argument in The Saffron Wave.
[Against the usual opposition of Gandhian work on the body/self/relation [satyagraha] and Nehruvian statist expertise, Hansen as I read him (brutally abstracting a complex argument) suggests their continuity in terms of a form of anti-politics in which everyday political process is inevitably contaminated by the scrum of vested interests. What is needed to rise above the near-Hobbsean state of nature produced by the play of interests is some sublime form of necessarily anti-democratic governance, and both Gandhi and Nehru if in quite distinctive ways turn to Indian civilization as its reason and justification.]
Big data and biometrics and corporate governance, if one draws on Hansen’s language, are the conditions of the contemporary sublime.
Biometrics in particular seem to matter. The sticking point according to the article in the earlier entente between UID and NPR was whether NPR would include biometric data or be more of a conventional census.
2) The irrelevance of cabinet position, the impotence of law: Chidambaram by all accounts is a powerful and canny politician and administrator. And yet his own lament at the deferral and exclusion of NPR and presumptively of India’s security interests [cf. "so when should we set up our camps," a statement extraordinary in so many ways] suggests he is no match for the Congress government’s commitment to Nilekani and the UIDAI, whether we are to read that commitment as the financial liberalization and technocratic bias of the Prime Minister or as the populism of the Nehru-Gandhi family and their sense that the rationalized entitlement UIDAI/Aadhaar promises is the effective update on the Garibi Hatao [Eliminate Poverty] tradition of their party.
Chidambaram was recently moved from Home to Finance: from the official home that is of NPR to the home of UID. But if that move was in part to force him to back down from his commitment to the security database it has failed. Here he to speak as if he was more responsible for the Home Ministry’s NPR than his current post’s baby.
Once a Home Minister, always a Home Minister
And note his point that NPR is mandated under law. Implicitly he is pointing out, like many critics of UIDAI across the political spectrum, that the latter’s grounding in law is shaky at best. At stake in one sense is arguably a shifting terrain of the formal and legal. Here at least the NPR/UID distinction marks a differential claim on law, a differential logic of law. In part, UID like some other forms of sublime governance operates through the logic of emergency or exception: Nilekani has a cabinet-level rank without the formal limits and protocols of a ministry. UIDAI may be a section of a section of a section of the Finance Ministry, but it is in many situations treated as all but independent. Or so its critics allege.
To bring in the logic of exception, a concept with a familial relation to Hansen’s use of the sublime, may invoke for some the work of Giorgio Agamben and in particular Partha Chatterjee’s use of an Agamben-ish distinction between “civil society” ["bios," life under law] and “political society” ["zoe," bare life under exception]. Here the Security apparatus, in the post-millennial United States the sine qua non of the zone of exception as opposed to formal law, becomes on the contrary the embodiment of statute and law and territory. The financial liberalization apparatus is set apart as the troubling extra-legal state of exception.
3) Scale and speed, the mastery of time and the Masses: NPR’s lament is not being able to start. But if UIDAI is responsible for freezing the time of its rival, in doing so it secures the familiar neoliberal claim that the state is inefficient and corrupts time itself. UID here appears phenomenal in capturing millions and millions of persons for their de-duplication, despite reports of old people being illegible to biometric recording and entire states (the Northeast) being zoned for NPR alone. It masters time, or if you like it masters India as the Masses through its use of time. NPR is denied time: or is its lament just the familiar plaint of the development state justifying its failures by blaming others? Such are the stakes of debate produced in this moment.
2724 - Invitation to Contract: Assam, Aadhaar, How Governments Now Work
Posted on August 14, 2012
Continuing on a series of posts on the Government of India’s early 2012 decision to keep “insecure” zones of the country like most of the Northeast (particularly its largest state, Assam) out of the Aadhaar/UID biometrics program, to be monitored instead by the more territorialized, security-focused National Population Register (NPR):
Life in the Security Zone: protesters against state evictions, June 2012, Guwahati, Assam
What Is and Is Not in the News
Assam is daily in the news, though the retraction of Aadhaar from the region receives almost no press. Given that Aadhaar has become central to the promissary return of contemporary governance, the card’s appearing to give back secure entitlements to electoral supporters of the ruling coalition (and of the rationalized “corporate-ethical” sector [more on this concept soon] granted increasing control over specific state functions), the withdrawal of this promissary return would seem to generate its own press. This is absent. I want to understand why.
The first answer is that Aadhaar has become so identified in Assam (and for many across India in relation to Assam in particular) with the “inflitration” of the Bangladeshi migrant into the citizenship and entitlement rolls that its removal generates little remorse among the dominant regional constiuencies of elite media, the media I at this point have access to via the Internet.
But one might expect the emergence of calls for a modified form of biometric registration, one that was not “universal” but separated citizens from mere residents in the dispensation of current entitlement and future promise. At this point I am going to argue that no such calls have emerged that are focused on the “proper” citizenry of Assam or at least no such calls seem to have been able to go public. I may well retract this claim if and when I can find substantial evidence to the contrary.
Such exclusive claims for rights in promissary citizenship in Assam are likely to be of two dominant kinds: rights in law [the Assamese resident and Indian citizen against the illegal migrant] and rights in nature [the Bodo autochthon against the non-Bodo stranger, the latter currently the illegal migrant]. But calls to redraft the form of Aadhaar to shore up these rights do not seem to have intensified with the state’s loss of easy access to UID.
The Assam-focused press is diverse, otherwise. It is devoted to registers of incivility and instability, of state violence and of state welfare in the face of civil violence. It seems both to support and to trouble the anti-migrant sentiment discussed in previous postings. Much national attention on Assam and its capital Guwahati has focused on the recent beating and forced-stripping of a girl in Guwahati this past July by a large group of jeering men, the event apparently captured on video. Many of the responses to the attack on this girl that I have seen on various media are complicit with a racialization of the Assamese as “backward” and somehow categorically unstable: in effect justifying the zonal distribution of modes of biometric control at stake in the division of the country between Security/NPR and Liberalization/UID.
There has been some press as well focused on resistance to government eviction drives against poor urban and rural slumdwellers occupying illegal “hutments.” The news photo above is of a piece with that genre.
None of these events are restricted to Assam–not communal killings, not sexualized violence against women, not the state policy of slum dispossession–but they form part of a mediascape affirming the state’s exceptional status and its exclusion, to use the first pass at a language I developed in the previous post, from the power zone of economic liberalization into the security zone [these terms are not conceptually adequate for many reasons, but for now the point is to focus on a zonal form of doubled or duplicated governance].
Two Orders of Contract?
Most of the documentation available online on Aadhaar in Assam is from the first, earlier moment, before January 2012, the moment when the biometric program’s promise for this marginal state had not been given over to the Security regime of NPR.
Information and reports at least via the Internet quickly dry up after January.
Perhaps the very nature of a security based enterprise like the NPR is that it produces a much smaller penumbra and far fewer traces of itself. Or to put it differently: both security interventions (like NPR) and liberalization interventions (like UID) now depend on a contractual relation between state agencies (like the ministries of home and of finance, respectively) and corporate sector companies to implement the new identity biometrics. But how contracts are established and entered into may differ between power zones and security zones. This post is a first effort to push myself to attend to the specificities of contract in the structuring of government: the emergent history of biometrics, in which twin national database regimes are being established in parallel, suggests that there is not a single pragmatics of contract, a single logic of governance, being crafted.
Having written this, I should note that I do not yet understand how the Interior Ministry’s NPR will work. It is tied to the Census, or has been, so part of the question is the organization of labor, capital, and control of the census over the next decade. I am in part assuming that security apparatuses, no less than other state functions, have throughout the world been given over to contract with privatized capital. But I should be cautious.
A second note of caution: the January 2012 entente between NPR and UID, between Security and Finance, between the Home Ministry and the Planning Commission, involved the powerful then Home Minister Chidambaram, who has recently again been given the Finance Ministry, a position he had earlier occupied. In other words, if the late 2011 struggle over the nation cum database focused on the tussle between these two ministries and presumably their distinct forms of governance over security and economy, how do we understand the movement back and forth of this powerful official?
Chidambaram aside, the very presence of two parallel such logics of governance and two parallel programs of biometric ID may suggest a second order of contract, not the contract between the state agency proposing and the private company executing one or the other mode of biometric inclusion but rather the contract governing the relation between two two orders or modes of registering people biometrically, of financial liberalization versus security.
What Was: Traces of the Earlier Promise of Aadhaar for Assam
The text for today is an RFQ, a Request for Quotation [that is a bid for contract] put out by the Government of Assam in the earlier phase of its relation to Aadhaar. For now I cite only a few small sections.
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