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

Thursday, August 20, 2015

8568 - Editorial: ePDS, the Andhra way - Financial Express

In Andhra, Aadhaar seeding removed 17% fake users

By: The Financial Express | August 19, 2015 12:23 AM

Enough has been written about the problems in cutting ration shop leakages—estimated at 46.7% at the national level by ICRIER’s Ashok Gulati and Shweta Saini—since not everyone has an Aadhaar number and, more important, the list of PDS beneficiaries has not been seeded with the unique identity numbers. Add to this the fact that it is the states that hold the key to seeding the PDS list with Aadhaar, and it seems impossible to ever crack the PDS leakage maze. Yet, as a page-1 story in FE on Monday pointed out, Andhra Pradesh has done an excellent job on this. In the Krishna district which has 2,155 fair price shops, the district has Point of Sale (PoS) devices in each outlet to check if those taking rations are indeed the beneficiaries by matching their biometrics with those in the Aadhaar database—that there were a mere 511 PDS outlets that had PoS devices to authenticate beneficiaries in May is an indication of the speed at which the task is being undertaken. For the Krishna district, the state estimates it is saving R8.2 crore a month by weeding out the fake beneficiaries, or just under R100 crore a year.

Needless to say, progress has not been uniform across the country, but in all of Andhra Pradesh, 95% of PDS beneficiaries had been verified via their Aadhaar numbers as of last month—it is just a matter of months before PoS devices, as in Krishna district, will be available in all ration shops across the state. As a result of the elimination of fake beneficiaries through the use of Aadhaar, while the state reported 4.53 crore PDS beneficiaries at one point, this is now down to 3.87 crore, or a little over 17%. In Telangana, 98.4% of all PDS beneficiaries had Aadhaar numbers embedded into their accounts in July—as a result of this, the number of beneficiaries in the state came down from 3.08 crore earlier to 2.82 crore. Other states that have done a very good job include tiny Puducherry where there is a 75% Aadhaar seeding ratio, Himachal Pradesh with 78%, Delhi and Chandigarh with 100%, and Sikkim 76%; Punjab has done reasonably with 66% Aadhaar seeding, but Haryana is a laggard with under 27%—Uttar Pradesh has a mere 0.19%, Bihar is 22.17%.


This is what prime minister Narendra Modi was alluding to when, in his Independence Day speech, he talked of a Rs 15,000 crore saving in LPG subsidies by weeding out fake customers through the use of Aadhaar—and this is without cutting the LPG subsidy per user. While Rs 15,000 crore is a large number, the potential PDS savings are even higher. The exact saving will depend upon the number of poor people in each of India’s 640 districts and the amount of food they are entitled to consume at subsidized prices, but a simple extrapolation of the Krishna number—India’s population divided by Krishna’s, and that ratio multiplied by Krishna’s savings—yields a number slightly above R27,000 crore. Given that the Supreme Court’s interim judgment makes it difficult to complete the seeding, the government has to impress upon it the problems with the interim judgment—SC has allowed use of Aadhaar for PDS operations but, at the same time, dealt a blow to it by ordering that the government widely publicise the fact that Aadhaar is not mandatory. If Aadhaar is not mandatory, why would states want to seed their list of PDS beneficiaries with it? Which is why, last week, the Election Commission said it was not going to weed out fake voter cards by seeding its list with Aadhaar numbers.
First Published on August 19, 2015 12:23 am