AADHAAR RELATED ARTICLES: 7701 - Aayog follows Gujarat on child tracker

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

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

7701 - Aayog follows Gujarat on child tracker - Telegraph India

Aayog follows Gujarat on child tracker

Ananya Sengupta

New Delhi, March 29: The government's new policy think-tank is set to launch its social sector plans with a scheme for women and children, tracking an expectant mother's first visit to a doctor till the tiny form that has stirred to life inside her completes primary school.

Officials said the Niti Aayog, which recently replaced the Planning Commission, had decided on the Aadhaar-based project when it met for the first time this February.

The womb-to-birth monitoring is a replication of a scheme Gujarat had conceived of and implemented when Narendra Modi was chief minister.

What the Aayog now plans to do is combine this scheme with another model - also conceived by Gujarat - to track the child's academic performance till Class VIII, to evolve a nationwide project.

Modi had attended the first meeting of the Aayog, but it's not clear if it was the Prime Minister who suggested the idea.

An official who was privy to the discussions at the meeting explained how the scheme would work. "The plan is to track a woman from her first visit to a doctor - a primary health centre or a hospital - to the birth of the child and then his/her vaccinations and his/her enrolment in school. This will be done through the Aadhaar number," the official said.

"The system will be such that parents would be alerted about vaccination days and health checkups automatically."

Sources said the scheme was part of the government's efforts to address what figures reveal are grim statistics (see chart) .

According to Unicef, 12.7 lakh children die every year in India before they complete five years of age, while 50,000 women die during pregnancy. As for schooling, some 14 lakh children don't have any idea of what a classroom is.

Under the Aayog's scheme, the unique identification (Aadhaar) numbers of both the woman and her husband would be noted down when she goes for her first check-up and fed into a centralised database, which will be accessible online.

The original idea, e-Mamta - a mobile-based technology being used by health workers to transmit and store information on pregnant women and infants - was first conceptualised and implemented by the Gujarat government in 2010.

The system has since then been rolled out in states like Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand.

Not everyone is impressed, though.

"Mobile or web-based tracking will not make up for the lack of doctors, nurses, schools, teachers and toilets. What is the point of generating so much data if there are no guarantees for the people? Instead of tracking the children, the government should track the delivery of basic facilities in every district. They are planning to do all this when there is a 50 per cent cut in the budget for the social sector," said child health activist Vandana Prasad of the Public Health Resource Network.

The Union budget for 2015-16 has slashed the allocation for children under the women and child development ministry by nearly 56 per cent, compared to last year's outlay, while funds for women under the WCD ministry is down by nearly 25 per cent.

Figures from Gujarat have, however, shown a positive trend since e-Mamta was introduced. If there were 48 child deaths for every 1,000 live births in 2010, the mortality rate dipped marginally to 44 in 2012.

The school-tracking scheme, another Gujarat innovation conceived in 2012, was launched in June 2014, the month after Modi took over as Prime Minister. It now covers around 87 lakh students.