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, February 8, 2018

12888 - Where are the poor in the Budget? - The Tribune

http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/where-are-the-poor-in-the-budget/539169.html

Opinion » Comment

Posted at: Feb 6, 2018, 12:04 AM; last updated: Feb 6, 2018, 12:04 AM (IST)

Where are the poor in the Budget?

Ashwini Deshpande
A crucial policy document, the Budget must provide appropriate cushions for the very poor. This, unfortunately, has not happened.

Ashwini Deshpande Where are the poor in the Budget?

In bad shape: What India needs is an institutionalised universal healthcare and not an insurance-based model.

Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi

The most optimistic estimates set the proportion of the Indian population below the poverty line at 22 per cent. And serious researchers of poverty argue that the official poverty line is among the lowest in the world; by any reasonable definition of poverty, the proportion of the poor would be far higher. But even the 22 per cent translates into roughly 300 million individuals. What does the 2018 Budget offer to this massive population of the poorest Indians?

The basic and universal life needs -food, employment, housing and healthcare - are even more critical for those who sit just above and below the poverty line, as any negative shock on these fronts could push the former into poverty, and make the climb out of poverty harder for the latter. And for those in chronic and desperate poverty, a negative shock could mean a difference between life and death.

With a problem of this magnitude, one would expect the Budget, which is a crucial policy document, to provide for appropriate cushions for the chronically poor, and ladders for the marginally poor to help them climb out. Unfortunately, these are conspicuous by their absence.

Let's take employment first, as poverty can be eliminated by generating jobs, and not through redistribution. The Budget does not address this at all! There is now increasing evidence to show how the ill-conceived demonetisation hit those using cash, and working in the informal economy, the hardest. This is the sector that the poor inhabit. In the backdrop of this massive negative hit, one would have expected the Budget to provide for ameliorating measures, but there are hardly any.

Research on the causes of poverty reveals that among the recurring triggers pushing people into poverty are negative health shocks. A highlight of this Budget is the National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), which promises a cover of up to Rs 5 lakh for 10 crore families per year. This sounds impressive until one realises that the Budget does not indicate how this scheme is to be financed. The outlay is just about Rs 2,000 crore, whereas this scheme would need at least 30 times as much, if not more. The absence of funding is the least of the problems with this scheme. For a country beset with poverty and poor access to healthcare, we need institutionalised universal healthcare like several European countries, not an insurance-based model, which might put money in the pockets of some hospitals and doctors, but may not admit every person deserving of treatment. The evidence from the earlier Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) reveals urgent problems in the institutional architecture. Additionally, in any insurance-based system, the issue of whether "pre-existing conditions" would be covered for treatment is contentious: what happens to the disabled and chronically sick population? What the Budget needed to provide for was resources to strengthen and revitalise primary healthcare, and also resources for the prevention of disease: clean water, efficient garbage and solid waste management, and sanitation. The Swacch Bharat Mission needed a clear-headed and hard rethink: to what extent has it moved beyond photo-ops and advertisements, and translated into cleaner neighbourhoods? What lessons can we learn from its failure?

A large section of the poor is rural and engaged in small agriculture. The Budget talks about the rural sector, but the focus is on infrastructure - rural haats, with electronic linkages - not as much on the causes of agrarian distress caused by high indebtedness and sudden loss of income due to crop failures. The "in principle" commitment, again not matched by any budgetary provision, to give minimum support prices (MSP)to ensure 50 per cent returns over the cost of production addresses only one aspect of the mix of factors underlying rural distress.

To be fair, there are schemes in the Budget that might benefit the rural poor, which are actually backed by financial outlays, such as LPG connections to replace conventional chullahs; roads; electrification with a focus on bringing electricity to every home (and not just the village) and housing -i.e. pucca houses with toilets. Only time will tell if the government will actually seize the bull by the horns: would the monetary outlays on these schemes be adequate, whether these deliver on their promises, and how effective these prove to be in terms of making a dent in the spread and depth of rural poverty.

Groups that disproportionately bear the brunt of poverty, such as Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims, and a large proportion of women, have little to cheer either. The outlays on existing schemes have not been significantly enhanced; more disappointing is the lack of review of how the existing schemes have fared, and there are no new initiatives to ensure decent livelihoods to groups that are discriminated against and marginalised.

The government's insistence on ABBA (Aadhaar-based biometric authentication) to access any government scheme is already proving to be disastrous for the poor. First is the issue of seeding - linking the Aadhaar card to various service providers. Then come immense problems in accessing services. Connectivity issues, erosion of lines on the hands of those engaged in hard manual labour, the bureaucratic contempt for the poor has meant that those most in need are unable to access existing government provisions, even if we forget the new ones that have been promised. ABBA is not a part of the Budget, but it defines the delivery architecture for all government services.

For the poor, overall, things look bleak. The Budget does not promise any imaginative and bold new measures, and access to existing schemes is sinking deeper and deeper in the ABBA quicksand.