AADHAAR RELATED ARTICLES: 5773 - Jayalalithaa terms Narendra Modi's push for Aadhaar a 'hasty cross-checking exercise'

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

Friday, August 15, 2014

5773 - Jayalalithaa terms Narendra Modi's push for Aadhaar a 'hasty cross-checking exercise' - Economic Times

Jayalalithaa terms Narendra Modi's push for Aadhaar a 'hasty cross-checking exercise'

Vikas Dhoot & M Rajshekhar, ET Bureau Aug 12, 2014, 04.00AM IST

NEW DELHI: Raising red flags over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's support for direct benefits transfer using Aadhaar, Tamil Nadu has refused to share its welfare schemes' databases for an experimental matching exercise of its beneficiaries against the UID database ordered by the PM.

Stressing that a hasty cross-check between schemes' beneficiary lists and UID numbers could end up denying benefits to a large number of poor and lead to a public outcry, the Jayalalitha government has told the Centre that this is an error-prone exercise and could end up drastically reducing central assistance to states.

Instead, the Tamil Nadu government has asked the Centre to speed up biometric enrollments under the home ministry's National Population Register and the issuance of Aadhaar numbers after de-duplication of these biometrics - a process that has slowed down in the last six months.

The AIDMK-ruled state is the second one after Rajasthan to not buy into the Direct Benefits Transfer vision conveyed by Prime Minister Modi in early July. Last month, Rajasthan CM Vasundara Raje told the PM that her government would follow an identity-card based model for welfare delivery in the state.

The PM has asked for UIDAI enrollments to be sped up in 300 districts and tasked the Planning Commission and the home ministry to undertake a time-bound verification of the UIDAI and NPR databases with the beneficiary lists of five welfare schemes in those districts. About a tenth of these districts are in Tamil Nadu.

"The state has expressed reservations about the direct benefits transfer regime proposed by the Centre and has refused to share its beneficiary lists for matching with UIDAI's database," said an official aware of a meeting held late last month by the Commission with top state government mandarins on the issue.

"Tamil Nadu has a large stake in eliminating bogus beneficiaries, as many of its schemes such as the PDS and pension offer higher benefits than the Centre, but it fears that comparing non-standardised databases with UID could lead to large number of poor being omitted from the system," said another official, adding that the state hasn't seeded the Aadhaar number in its beneficiary lists.

The state's arguments are based on a pilot project it is undertaking with the UID Authority of India or UIDAI in Perambalur district to collate multiple departments' databases, that revealed that there is no standard format or structure for these beneficiary lists.

"Names and addresses are incomplete, birth dates are not always available. The software to compare NPR-backed Aadhaar numbers with beneficiary lists under the pilot project, often throws up many partial matches that would have to be verified manually in the field to ensure no genuine beneficiary is deleted," said the official.

The beneficiary list-matching exercise mandated by the PM is being carried out for five schemes - pension programmes, Mahatma Gandhi NREGA, post-matric scholarships, public distribution system and LPG cylinders. The Centre has created a new portal where states are expected to upload digitized beneficiary lists for these schemes to enable a quick comparison with the UIDAI-maintained Aadhaar database.

But the southern state has said that it would need 'policy approval' from 'higher levels' to consider and accede to the Centre's request of uploading these databases.

"If the purpose of the exercise is to assess the utility of either the NPR or UIDAI initiatives, Tamil Nadu's model where both the NPR biometric enrollment and the UIDAI-driven authentication is being followed illustrates the utility of the two intiatives," a top state government official said at the meeting on July 22.

The state has sought the Centre's support for completing NPR enrollments and issuing Aadhaar numbers, stating that the Supreme Court verdict against making Aadhaar numbers mandatory for official transactions had slowed down the process.

Tamil Nadu has, incidentally, sanctioned Rs 25 crore to create a single database of its residents based on NPR enrollments, called the State Residents' Data Hub or SRDH and the pilot in Perambalu is aimed at ironing out any chinks in the process.

"Once the NPR enrolment reaches about 90%, then it could become the basis for different departments to identify beneficiaries through the SRDH," the state officials explained, asking the Centre to establish permanent NPR enrollment centres at the taluka level to update the database over time.

Tamil Nadu is not the first state to try creating such a database of state residents. In 2008, Delhi had attempted to create a super-database of all welfare beneficiaries by recording members in each household, their income, education, asset ownership and caste. In 2012, Madhya Pradesh too had followed suit.