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, March 29, 2018

13125 - Aadhaar: Is India's biometric ID scheme hurting the poor? - BBC


India correspondent
  • 27 March 2018


Jama Singh has an Aadhaar number but he can't use it as his age has been listed as 102

For six to seven days every month, says Muniya Devi, her five-member family doesn't get food to eat.

The frail 31-year-old lives with her children in an arid village in Jharkhand, one of India's poorest states. Her husband, Bushan, works in a brick kiln some 65km (40 miles) away, earning 130 rupees ($1.90; £1.40) a day.

For the last three years, they have been deprived of subsidised food from India's vast public distribution system, a lifeline for the poor. That is not because supplies have dried up at the neighbourhood shop, but because their ration cards have not been linked to their biometric-based 12-digit personal identification numbers.

A BBC investigation found many others in the state with similar complaints.

More than a billion Indians now have the ID number, called Aadhaar, meaning foundation in Hindi. What started as a voluntary programme to tackle benefit fraud has now grown into the world's most ambitious, and controversial, digital identity programme. It has also become increasingly necessary for financial transactions and access to social welfare.

People at the office demanded a bribe to get the job done, so she paid them 400 rupees, nearly four days of family earnings.Three months ago Muniya Devi travelled some 35km to the nearest town to submit the forms and papers necessary to get her family's ration cards linked to Aadhaar.


Going by Aadhaar cards, most villagers in Jharkhand were born on New Year's Day

"They say the network is down, the computer is not working. And I keep borrowing food to feed my family," she told me.
In Vishnubandh where Muniya Devi lives, the majority of the 282 families are landless. On good days, a meal means rice and a potato and fava beans curry. On bad days, there's nothing. Hunger is a constant companion.

At least Muniya Devi has company in her misery. The food rations of 60 out of 350 beneficiaries in the village have been discontinued after they failed to link their cards to Aadhaar in time.

Most of them tell stories about fruitless trips to government offices and paying bribes. The government made the linkage mandatory some two years ago, a move economist and activist Jean Dreze calls "coercive and anti-poor".
'Starvation death'

Things came to a head in September when reports emerged that an 11-year-old girl had died of starvation in the state's Simdega district, months after her family stopped getting subsidised food because they failed to link their ration cards to Aadhaar.

Santoshi Kumari, a school dropout, had gone without food for four days before she had salt and tea. She died a few hours later. A senior official told me that the allegation that she died of starvation "could not be substantiated".

"There have been half-a-dozen such reported deaths," says Dr Dreze. "We can differ on whether they died of starvation, but the fact is that in all these cases there was no food at home for days because of some Aadhaar-related issue."

That's not all. Last March, Jharkhand cancelled some 760,000 "fake" food-ration cards. Dr Dreze believes most of them were annulled because they were not linked to Aadhaar, resulting in thousands of people being deprived of food.
"Investigations are going on to find out why these cards were cancelled," an official told me.



Najma Bibi says she had to pay a bribe to become eligible for her old age pension
Under the law, ration shops - there are more than 25,000 such shops distributing more than two million tonnes of subsidised food in Jharkhand - cannot deny supplies to those who are eligible just because they don't have Aadhaar or have failed to link it to their ration cards.
But the evidence on the ground is mixed as many intended recipients are still being turned away.
"I admit that in some places there's a problem with our messaging and people are not getting the information that no Aadhaar doesn't mean no food," Jharkhand's top official in charge of food supplies, Amitabh Kaushal, told me.
"We will have to fix that."
But critics say the government is speaking with a forked tongue. Dr Dreze says he has video evidence of a senior official telling villagers recently that "without Aadhaar it was not possible to get a ration card", effectively cutting off access to subsidised food.
Mr Kaushal insists, though, that the number of people not getting access to subsidised food is paltry. "What you are seeing are the rarest of the rare cases," he says.
He says the ration cards of more than 80% of the 26 million beneficiaries of subsidised food in the state have already been linked to Aadhaar. More importantly, he says, 99% of beneficiary households have been linked to the number, meaning that at least one member of the family has access to cheap food.
Dr Dreze says that the high linkage rates are "not surprising after you've cancelled so many ration cards not linked to Aadhaar in the first place".


Image caption
Railo Devi has not been receiving her pension for over a year
Mr Kaushal also denies the allegation that ration shops are turning away a large number of beneficiaries who are having problems authenticating their thumbprint on hand-held networked machines, which sometimes don't work because of poor internet connections or power cuts.

In January alone, he says, 800,000 of the 4.7 million "food transactions" were "offline" - food given away despite Aadhaar-related glitches.

Many pensioners in Jharkhand are in the same bind. There are some 1.2 million elderly, widowed and disabled people who are eligible for monthly pensions of 600-800 rupees.

Last year, the government made it mandatory to link pensions to Aadhaar and also struck off 300,000 "fake" pensioners from the list of beneficiaries.

A study by independent researchers Risabh Malhotra and Anmol Somanchi found that fakes make up a fraction of deleted pensions.
"In the process," they say, "many genuine pensioners have been excluded." Critics say this has mainly happened because of mistakes made by data operators, resulting in discrepancies in name and age.

Faulty linking
Such errors have led to tragicomic results. Due to absence of birth certificates or mistakes by overworked data operators, residents of entire villages share the New Year Day of different years as their birth date.
Jama Singh, a wizened old farmer living in Sadwadih village, is unable to qualify for a pension because his Aadhaar card lists his age as 102 years.
"When we took him to banks to open an account, they told us that their software doesn't allow them to enter a three-digit age. So now officials are telling us to declare him 80 years old and apply for a new Aadhaar," Pachathi Singh, a neighbour, told me.
"I don't know how old I am, but there are people younger than me here who are getting old age pensions," Jama Singh told me. "Is that fair?"


Image caption
Rajkumari Devi's pension stopped last October because she had not linked her bank account to Aadhaar
In Khunti, some 100km away from Vishnubandh, some 20,000 pension holders - mostly women - have been deleted from the list of beneficiaries because of "faulty linking" with bank accounts, say activists. Rajkumari Devi's pension, for example, stopped last October because she had not linked her bank account to Aadhaar.

The 84-year-old has spent nearly a month's worth of pension money going to the banks in the nearest town to get the matter fixed. The bank tells her the "money is not coming". Her savings have dwindled to 73 rupees, and her dignity is broken.
When her son tells her that he will continue to take care of her, Rajkumari Devi admonishes him.

"My money is my money," she says. "Why should I live on your benevolence?"