In 2009, I became extremely concerned with the concept of Unique Identity for various reasons. Connected with many like minded highly educated people who were all concerned.
On 18th May 2010, I started this Blog to capture anything and everything I came across on the topic. This blog with its million hits is a testament to my concerns about loss of privacy and fear of the ID being misused and possible Criminal activities it could lead to.
In 2017 the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict after one of the longest hearings on any issue. I did my bit and appealed to the Supreme Court Judges too through an On Line Petition.
In 2019 the Aadhaar Legislation has been revised and passed by the two houses of the Parliament of India making it Legal. I am no Legal Eagle so my Opinion carries no weight except with people opposed to the very concept.
In 2019, this Blog now just captures on a Daily Basis list of Articles Published on anything to do with Aadhaar as obtained from Daily Google Searches and nothing more. Cannot burn the midnight candle any longer.
"In Matters of Conscience, the Law of Majority has no place"- Mahatma Gandhi
Ram Krishnaswamy
Sydney, Australia.

Aadhaar

The UIDAI has taken two successive governments in India and the entire world for a ride. It identifies nothing. It is not unique. The entire UID data has never been verified and audited. The UID cannot be used for governance, financial databases or anything. It’s use is the biggest threat to national security since independence. – Anupam Saraph 2018

When I opposed Aadhaar in 2010 , I was called a BJP stooge. In 2016 I am still opposing Aadhaar for the same reasons and I am told I am a Congress die hard. No one wants to see why I oppose Aadhaar as it is too difficult. Plus Aadhaar is FREE so why not get one ? Ram Krishnaswamy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.-Mahatma Gandhi

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.Mahatma Gandhi

“The invasion of privacy is of no consequence because privacy is not a fundamental right and has no meaning under Article 21. The right to privacy is not a guaranteed under the constitution, because privacy is not a fundamental right.” Article 21 of the Indian constitution refers to the right to life and liberty -Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi

“There is merit in the complaints. You are unwittingly allowing snooping, harassment and commercial exploitation. The information about an individual obtained by the UIDAI while issuing an Aadhaar card shall not be used for any other purpose, save as above, except as may be directed by a court for the purpose of criminal investigation.”-A three judge bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar said in an interim order.

Legal scholar Usha Ramanathan describes UID as an inverse of sunshine laws like the Right to Information. While the RTI makes the state transparent to the citizen, the UID does the inverse: it makes the citizen transparent to the state, she says.

Good idea gone bad
I have written earlier that UID/Aadhaar was a poorly designed, unreliable and expensive solution to the really good idea of providing national identification for over a billion Indians. My petition contends that UID in its current form violates the right to privacy of a citizen, guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This is because sensitive biometric and demographic information of citizens are with enrolment agencies, registrars and sub-registrars who have no legal liability for any misuse of this data. This petition has opened up the larger discussion on privacy rights for Indians. The current Article 21 interpretation by the Supreme Court was done decades ago, before the advent of internet and today’s technology and all the new privacy challenges that have arisen as a consequence.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

“What is Aadhaar? There is enormous confusion. That Aadhaar will identify people who are entitled for subsidy. No. Aadhaar doesn’t determine who is eligible and who isn’t,” Jairam Ramesh

But Aadhaar has been mythologised during the previous government by its creators into some technology super force that will transform governance in a miraculous manner. I even read an article recently that compared Aadhaar to some revolution and quoted a 1930s historian, Will Durant.Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha MP

“I know you will say that it is not mandatory. But, it is compulsorily mandatorily voluntary,” Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Saba April 2017.

August 24, 2017: The nine-judge Constitution Bench rules that right to privacy is “intrinsic to life and liberty”and is inherently protected under the various fundamental freedoms enshrined under Part III of the Indian Constitution

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the World; indeed it's the only thing that ever has"

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -Edward Snowden

In the Supreme Court, Meenakshi Arora, one of the senior counsel in the case, compared it to living under a general, perpetual, nation-wide criminal warrant.

Had never thought of it that way, but living in the Aadhaar universe is like living in a prison. All of us are treated like criminals with barely any rights or recourse and gatekeepers have absolute power on you and your life.

Announcing the launch of the # BreakAadhaarChainscampaign, culminating with events in multiple cities on 12th Jan. This is the last opportunity to make your voice heard before the Supreme Court hearings start on 17th Jan 2018. In collaboration with @no2uidand@rozi_roti.

UIDAI's security seems to be founded on four time tested pillars of security idiocy

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Saturday, January 18, 2014

5016 - Biometrics Solve Financial Uncertainty In India

Biometrics Solve Financial Uncertainty In India
18 December 2013

Venture partner at Menlo Ventures Karl Mehta and serial entrepreneur Carol Realini are currently crowdsourcing success stories for their new book "Financial Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid." Originally profiled in a November 21 article for PYMNTS.com, the book aims to draw attention to real-world solutions that stand to deliver exponential growth in financial access.

This entry is Part 2 of a three-part series that will profile Realini's trip to India to meet with nominees.

By Carol Realini (@carolrealini) and Shrikant Karwa

Meeting Nandan Nilekani to know about his latest projects and to understand his perspective on current affairs is always insightful. So here I am, in the office of the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in central New Delhi.

In July 2009, at the invitation of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Nandan left his comfortable position as managing director of the immensely successful IT company Infosys, which he had co-founded, to helm the UIDAI project.

The project is currently the world’s largest, biometric-based identity system that provides a token-free, online authentication service. “Aadhaar," as the project is branded, means “foundation” in several Indian languages. True to its name, it provides support to various service delivery platforms in the country to minimize the friction in the large volume of transactions, encountered routinely in India.

The importance and relevance of a robust ID system in the pursuit of successful financial inclusion stories dawned on me only when I met Nandan and started envisaging the challenges that one would be faced with in the absence of a ubiquitous ID system. I suppose that in the western and developed world, where ubiquitous ID systems are always present, one tends to think of it as a given. The challenge there is to build systems and processes based on the existing ID system whereas in developing countries, this itself is a challenge and thus an essential ingredient from a long-term, sustainable, scalable, low-cost solution perspective.

Countries like India lack an institutional birth delivery infrastructure, creating a weak birth-record system – the first step in an ID system. This has a cascading effect and creates challenges for a robust, ubiquitous ID system for service delivery. Not having an ID or an ID system can lead to exclusion from people-interaction initiatives be it buying a SIM card for a mobile phone, verification at a security check point, opening a bank account compliant with Know Your Customer requirements or even voting.

This is the area where Nandan’s Aadhaar project is making the lives of millions of Indians easier. The project assigns a 12-digit number to an individual based on his/her biometrics, making the number unique. It is impressive to know that UIDAI has issued more than 500 Million unique Aadhaar numbers to the residents of India in little more than three years.

Currently, it generates about 1 million Aadhaar numbers daily. The key to achieving such massive success in a typical government system has been to focus on speed, to create a prototype of every model as early as possible and roll it out as soon as possible, learn from field lessons and improvise. Other pillars for success, such as using open-source technologies where possible, interoperability and strict no vendor lock-ins, using commodity hardware, planning for scale from day one and not compromising on the quality of data collected, have resulted in the project costing less than $2 per Aadhaar issued.

This is how Aadhaar takes India from largely being a no-identity infrastructure country to one that has an online identity compatible ID infrastructure. In the process, it leapfrogs over an entire generation of token-based identity systems prevalent in much of the developed world. Nandan explains that Aadhaar has been designed as an identity platform on which various service providers can become UIDAI partners to leverage Aadhaar for online identity verification. In addition, it empowers a resident to share his ID information, which is with UIDAI, with a third-party service provider by giving an active consent for the same.

Aadhaar’s role solely focuses on and is limited to the sphere of providing identity; it has no knowledge of the kind of interaction the resident has with service providers. This federated model works in the interest of protecting the resident’s privacy with no collation of resident centric information at one location.

The banking regulator, Reserve Bank of India, has accepted Aadhaar to meet stringent Know Your Customer requirements for opening a bank account. In addition, inter-bank payment routing organizations such as the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), VISA, etc. have built a mapper linking Aadhaar to the resident Bank A/c. Thus Aadhaar becomes a convenient financial address for residents, working as a KYC and a conduit for convenient remittances, providing an end-to-end solution for financial inclusion.

At the heart of the success of the Aadhaar project is the biometric de-duplication process deployed by UIDAI to establish uniqueness of each resident. As a part of this process, every new, incoming identity biometric is compared with all the existing biometrics, Aadhaar numbers for which have already been issued. Only when the new applicant’s biometrics are found to be truly unique does a new Aadhaar gets generated. This process requires the technology system to perform trillions of comparisons everyday to produce a million new identities daily.

Nandan demonstrated how the Aadhaar number, once generated, is used to verify identity online in a ubiquitous manner. Nandan entered his Aadhaar number and fingerprint in the live attendance system installed at the UIDAI office in Delhi. The system responded with a successful match after comparing the fingerprint and Aadhaar number with a database in a remote data centre in real time. Nandan demonstrated it again, this time using his iris instead of the fingerprint, showing how the identity project aims to be inclusive for residents facing problems with fingerprint authentication.

Nandan put it succinctly when he asked me to envisage Aadhaar as a system that tells “who you are” just like a GPS system tells “where you are." The U.S. government had originally built the GPS system to guide bombs and missiles, but when it opened the technology for other uses, it created an entirely new domain – that of location-based services, such as TomTom, etc.

Similarly, Aadhaar will initially fulfill traditional applications requiring identity to meet KYC norms, attendance, etc. with the promise it will find application to novel, never imagined applications and creation of entirely new industries and services.

Stay tuned to Part 3 of our series for more updates from Realini and her trip on PYMNTS.com. To learn more about hte benefits of biometrics, read our latest Report Store report here. 

For more facts about the challenge facing the Indian financial services industry read on.
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