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

Sunday, May 13, 2018

13529 - “Aadhaar-Enabled Savings Are Nothing But Government-Sponsored Propaganda”: Jean Drèze On Social-Welfare Programmes Under The Nda Government - Caravan Magazine




By SAGAR | 11 May 2018


                              COURTESY JEAN DRÈZE

The economist Jean Drèze’s book, Sense and Solidarity, published in late 2017, deals with the impact of Aadhaar on social-welfare programmes, such as the National Food Security Act and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, among other things. Drèze was a member of the United Progressive Alliance government’s advisory council, which designed the NFSA and MGNREGS. He co-authored some of the essays in this book with colleagues and activist friends, including his wife, Bela Bhatia. Drèze spoke to Sagar, a web reporter at The Caravan, about the National Democratic Alliance government’s indifference towards social-welfare programmes, many of which have seen the exclusion of genuine beneficiaries due to the mandatory requirement of an Aadhaar number.

Sagar: You have suggested in the book that in the framing of a public policy, empathy and interaction with the oppressed is as important as statistical evidence. Does the government share that approach to public policy?
Jean Drèze:
 What I have written is that experience is as important as evidence, and that one useful role of experience is to help us re-examine our values. Our values are often influenced by our interests, or the interests of the class or caste or social group we identify with. For policy-makers, that would usually mean a privileged group. Spending time with underprivileged people can help to see things from their point of view. To illustrate, India’s public distribution system tends to be disparaged as a wasteful freebie in the business media, but poor people often see it as a lifeline. That is not, in itself, a vindication of the public distribution system, but it is certainly a useful insight.
Coming to your question, the government’s approach to public policy seems to me to pay little attention to the lives of the underprivileged. Critical decisions are mostly taken behind closed doors in the Prime Minister’s Office or finance ministry, where the poor are just numbers on a computer screen. Demonetisation is a prime example of the dangers of this approach. To this day, the government claims against all reason that the operation was a success, based, for instance, on statistics related to digital payments and tax compliance. The fact that millions of poor people were pushed to the wall for weeks if not months after demonetisation does not seem to matter at all. In the recent debate that accompanied the first anniversary of demonetisation, one even sensed a kind of Darwinian outlook that celebrates the survival of the fittest.

S: You recount incidents of extreme hunger and starvation during 2001 in villages of Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. What had led to such a situation there, and have the government’s health and food schemes reached those places yet?
JD: 
These incidents were partly due to chronic poverty, aggravated by widespread drought. But they were also made possible by a virtual absence of any sort of public support for vulnerable households. Instead, the government was busy accumulating huge food stocks at that time, well in excess of official buffer norms. This reduced the effective food supply and heightened food prices, even as people were struggling to survive. Far from helping, public policy contributed to starving the poor.
This has certainly changed to a significant extent, with the creation or expansion of social programmes such as the public distribution system, school meals, social security pensions and the MGNREGS. These programmes do reach far and wide, and there is considerable evidence that they make a difference. Of course, there are plenty of shortcomings and irregularities. But at least some foundations have been laid for a possible social security system.

S: The prime minister once scoffed at MGNREGS in Parliament and said he will not abolish it and keep it going so that he can trumpet the failure of the UPA government, which introduced the scheme. Do you think there is a deliberate attempt from the NDA government to weaken schemes such as the MGNREGS?
JD: 
The prime minister spoke in jest on this subject, and while the remark was in bad taste, we should not read too much in it. However, there are many other signs that the NDA government is not interested in social policy. The main priority seems to be to save money. Social schemes have been retained, because rolling them back would be politically risky, but they have been left to languish. With the partial exception of Swacch Bharat Mission, there have been no significant initiatives in the field of social policy during the last four years.
Sometimes, the fixation with saving money is truly deplorable. Consider for instance maternity entitlements—all pregnant women have been entitled to cash benefits of Rs 6,000 per child since 2013, under the National Food Security Act. After brazenly ignoring this for three years, the NDA government finally made a modest provision for maternity entitlements in last year’s Union Budget and notified a new scheme for pregnant women, the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana. In the same stroke, however, it discontinued an earlier scheme, the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana, taking back with one hand most of what it was giving with the other. Further, maternity benefits under this new scheme are restricted to one child per woman, and reduced to Rs 5,000 instead of Rs 6,000. In short, the government is making a pretence of accepting its responsibilities under the food security act, but actually diluting women’s entitlements at every step. This is not only unfair and illegal, but also very short-sighted considering the importance of maternal health for the well-being and future of Indian children, not to speak of women themselves. Maternity benefits are not very costly and could go a long way, but this is of no interest to the NDA leadership.

S: This government has shifted to Aadhaar-based transfers for schemes such as old-age pensions and MGNREGS, and claimed that the new system is saving crores of public money. What’s your view?
JD:
 Most of the recent claims about Aadhaar-enabled savings are nothing but government-sponsored propaganda. Ministries and state governments are under pressure to report figures of Aadhaar-enabled savings, and some faithfully toe the line. One recent example is the Jharkhand government’s startling claim, on 11 September 2017, that it had cancelled more than 11 lakh fake ration cards with the help of Aadhaar. Firstly, the figure is wrong, and was indeed retracted later. Second, most of the cancelled cards are not fake cards at all. Some of them were ordinary ration cards that had been cancelled in the routine process of updating the lists. For instance, when a joint household splits, the old card is often cancelled in favour of separate cards for the new households. In other cases, cards were cancelled because the cardholders had failed to link their ration card with Aadhaar, for no fault of their own. This is the worst type of so-called Aadhaar-enabled savings, where eligible people are bumped off the lists and then the savings are credited to Aadhaar.

S: Last year, Baba Ramdev was lobbying to win a contract worth Rs 700 crore to supply packaged food under the midday-meal scheme to schools in Uttar Pradesh. How would this affect the scheme and children who are beneficiaries?
JD:
 This sounds like a replay of the infamous hijacking of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in Uttar Pradesh by Ponty Chadha. Even as most other states were moving away from ready-to-eat mixtures to cooked food for children in the age group of three to six years, Uttar Pradesh continued to give them a useless mixture called panjiri. This panjiri did nothing for child nutrition, but it meant a hugely lucrative contract for the winning supplier. In this case, the winner was Ponty Chadha, a notorious gangster-businessman close to Mayawati, who also had the monopoly of liquor licenses in Uttar Pradesh at one time. Baba Ramdev is the new Ponty Chadha. Replacing cooked midday meals in UP schools, if it happens, will be disastrous for children but it will be another business coup for Ramdev.

S: There have been reports of caste conflicts in the implementation of the midday-meal scheme because upper-caste families did not allow their children to dine with Dalit children and refused to let them eat food prepared by Dalit cooks. How will the packaged food system negotiate with this caste conflict? Will it get worse or better?
JD: 
What needs attention here is not just caste conflict, but also the positive value of midday meals as a way of combating caste prejudice. It may be true that replacing cooked food with packaged food would ease caste tensions around midday meals, since upper-caste parents who object to their child eating wholesome food cooked by a Dalit woman may not object to them eating biscuits or potato chips. In the process, however, an opportunity will be missed to challenge these prejudices and impart more egalitarian values to children. When children learn to sit together and share a meal irrespective of caste, the caste system takes a healthy blow.

S: Recently, the government also made Aadhaar compulsory for children to avail the benefits of the midday-meal programme. How will it affect the coverage?
JD: 
Hopefully, this will not affect the coverage of midday meals because school teachers will be sensible enough not to deprive any child of food for lack of Aadhaar. But it will cause a lot inconvenience and waste of time, for no purpose. If midday-meal registers are inflated, by adding the names of pupils who are actually absent, linking children’s names with Aadhaar will not help unless it is combined with biometric authentication for every meal. Daily biometric authentication is bound to create the sort of chaos we have already seen in the public distribution system. It would also reduce coverage, and exclude many children for no fault of their own. Quite likely, the real purpose of making Aadhaar compulsory for midday meals is to force children to enrol. This is one example, among others, of the coercive and invasive nature of Aadhaar.

S: In September last year, hundreds of MGNREGS workers were on dharna for five days in Delhi to protest against delays in wage payments and other infringements of their rights. What does the protest indicate?
JD:
 The protest was mainly about the stagnation of real wages under MGNREGS, delays in wage payments, and the denial of compensation for delayed payments. Almost ten years have passed since bank payments of MGNREGS wages were introduced. Yet the system is still unequal to the task of paying wages within 15 days, as prescribed under the act. Sometimes wages are even lost in transit due to technical glitches in the Aadhaar-based payment system. Wages are also held up for other reasons from time to time—in Jharkhand, for instance, wages were held up for months last year because a few districts had not submitted their social audit reports to the central government. In one district, apparently, the report was delayed because the district coordinator was on paternity leave. In these and other ways, MGNREGS workers are constantly held hostage to lack of funds, centre-state disputes, and technical hurdles. Aside from being a grave injustice, this threatens to undermine the entire programme. If people have worked, they must be paid without delay.

S: You write that whoever thinks the Kashmir problem is due to lack of development is severely deluded. Could you explain why it is not a problem of development?
JD:
 Kashmir is actually a prosperous state compared with most Indian states. That is obvious to any visitor, and also evident from statistical data. For instance, official poverty estimates based on National Sample Survey data suggest that poverty rates in Jammu and Kashmir are among the lowest in India. Jammu and Kashmir’s social indicators are also quite good: better, for instance, than those of Gujarat, almost across the board, despite Gujarat being regarded by some as a model. Kashmir does have a serious unemployment problem, aggravated by years of conflict, but living standards there are relatively good. So, lack of development is a very misleading explanation for the Kashmir conflict. This explanation is part of a larger discourse aimed at denying or obfuscating the real reasons for the deep alienation of the Kashmiri people from India.

This interview has been edited and condensed.