1001 - 29th September 2010 marks the dooms day for India: Ram Krishnaswamy

CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE - Posted by Ram Krishna Swamy

This is an email I shared with many friends opposed to Aadhaar on 28th Sept 2010 and am surprised to note that it has been blogged in Banyan Tree.  I am not offended but proves my point that there is no such thing as privacy or security in internet or the digitised world of today.

It is 5th Jan 2011 today and Aadhaar which means "Foundation" is shaping up more and more as as a comedy of errors like "Fawlty Towers" . (Fawlty Towers (1975–1979) was a BBC television sitcom about hotel owner Basil Fawlty's incompetence, short fuse, and arrogance that form a combination that ensures accidents and trouble are never far away.)

The Latest news is that the nation is full of touts selling Aadhaar forms, and helping poor people complete them for a fee and act as referees providing details of false residential addresses that get accepted by Aadhaar Registrars, perhaps for a small fee. There is nothing the NIAI Chief sitting in his Fawlty Towers can do to rectify such practices.

After all UIDAI or NIAIs responsibility is only issuing an identity number called Aadhaar and all responsibility to gather information and biometrics falls on State Governments not UIDAI. 


Aadhaar is an expensive joke to say the least.

Ram

______________________________________

posted by bargad on September 28, 2010

authored by Ram Krishnaswamy
 

29th September 2010, will go down in history as a sad day, when poor and illiterate masses will be herded in like cattle in Nandurbar in Maharashtra to be “BRANDED” for life and issued a Unique number and a Barcode that is not so Unique anymore called “Aadhaar”.

This will be followed by branding  600 million voiceless poor and illiterate masses in the next four years with IT companies & American Consultants raking in as much as Rs 45000 crores or US $ 9 Billion that could have been used to boost primary education and health services.

Not only the poor, Aadhaar numbers will be forcefully issued to school children from first class to 10th standards.. 

How could something that is meant to be optional be forced on children is a question that we have to ask ? Do the children, citizens of tomorrow have a choice ? Do we as parents have a choice to decide if our school going children should register for Aadhaar or not ? I see this as a cunning ploy by UIDAI to make what is touted as optional as a compulsory registration.

Aadhaar is based on a false premise marketed through “Imagining India” by Nandan Nilekani, that has very very weak foundations such as, giving the poor the identity that the Govt lacks to provide its services through PDS and NREGA.

If you are reading this you have to be educated. Please ask yourself the question if you as an educated Indian will queue up for Aadhaar. If not why not ? 


Would you like to have all your pieces of identity like Passport, Driving Licence, PAN Card, Ration Card, Mobile Phone numbers, Bank account number  etc etc all linked up by one common number called Aadhaar. Would you like your tax man to know details of all your bank accounts and savings ? If the answer is yes, I have nothing to say.

If your answer is no, then if it is not good for you and me why is it being forced on the poor and illiterate and innocent school children who do not have a clue about consequences, where this very Aadhaar can be abused by people in power and law enforcers.

On the other hand if Aadhaar was to be compulsorily issued to all central and state public servants and is to be used to weed out corruption it makes sense as it will save the nation billions that can be used for the betterment of society. No we do not want to touch corrupt officials who swindle thousands of crores yet we want to use Aadhaar for de duplication to ensure that no poor man can get twice the amount of the 35 Kg rice he is allotted per month. 

The reality is that most poor cannot even afford to buy the full allocated quota of 35 kg per month as they do not have the money.. 35 KG at Rs 3 works out to Rs 105 and here is UIDAI that will issue bank accounts to people who cannot afford Rs 105 a month to avail their full quota of rice..and to make this possible all national banks have signed MOUs with UIDAI now NIAI to get a share of 600 million new bank accounts that will have no money in them

UIDAI which has now become NIAI and sounds like “Truth” is a Mega untruth & a swindle by the IT sector. The Cabinet and the PM are going along only to save face at this point of time. The resistance is mounting and UIDAI officials like Director General of UIDAI Mr.R.S.Sharma cannot tell NAC members that questions raised “reflects some fundamental misunderstandings on the objectives of the UIDAI”. Mr Sharma should realise that NAC members raising questions are better qualified than he is on socio economic matters

The FBI in USA has only 55 million records and 100 000 verifications each day  and  used only for security purposes and to track criminals or potential terrorists which is justified.

Aadhaar Computer on the other hand ( if successful) will contain at least 600 million records if not 1.2 Billion and will require 2 to 3 million authentications on a daily basis only to issue NREGA payments and PDS allocations.

Does India need this white elephant to care for the poor when we have simpler solutions staring us in the face like  decentralisng PDS and empowering Panchayats ?  


But then haw can we expect a billionaire who confesses he knows more about New York than Villages in India to know how to serve the poor in India ? Not long before citizens of the largest democracy in the world wake up and put an end to Aadhaar..
Quoting Rajiv Gandhi “Democracy was the greatest gift of our freedom struggle to the people of India. Independence made the nation free. Democracy made our people free. A free people are a people who are governed by their will and ruled with their consent. A free people are a people who participate in decisions affecting their lives and their destinies”.

The question is are we a free people who can participate in decisions afffecting our lives and destinies or should we allow self professed wizard & IT czar like Nandan Nilekani to make these decisions for 1.2 billion people ?
 

“Hi-tech without Panchayati Raj is just a bogus stunt for geeks and nerds.” says Mani Shankar Aiyar, Congress leader

Ram Krishnaswamy, Sydney, Australia
http://aadhararticles.blogspot.com/
http://questioningaadhaar.blogspot.com/

ramrajah@optusnet.com.au
Please feel free to post your comments on the article in the blog.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Edmund Burke
 

“Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist”. Edmund Burke
 

“In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.” Mahatma Gandhi
 

“Democracy was the greatest gift of our freedom struggle to the people of India. Independence made the nation free. Democracy made our people free. A free people are a people who are governed by their will and ruled with their consent. A free people are a people who participate in decisions affecting their lives and their destinies”. Rajiv Gandhi
 

Hi-tech without Panchayati Raj is just a bogus stunt for geeks and nerds.” Mani Shankar Aiyar, Congress leader

994 - Will Aadhaar be the next Indian Scam ? - By Ram Krishnaswamy

Monday, January 3, 2011

994 - Will Aadhaar be the next Indian Scam ? - By Ram Krishnaswamy

CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE - Posted by Ram Krishna Swamy

BROKER-MENACE SPOILS AADHAAR IN MYSORE 

Read the full article in the blog

I am not at all surprised to read this article in ‘Star of Mysore’ early in the New Year. After the release of the Radia Tapes, the Media is possibly waking up in 2011 to its responsibilities ‘to report news and not create paid news’; plus the Aadhaar advertising budget is probably getting depleted without creating the anticipated impact and main players in the media who have been the mouth piece of NN, UIDAI and Aadhaar have gone a bit silent lately. ( My Google alerts can hardly find any news for my blog :-)

We must always  remember that “Truth, friendship and loyalties can never be bought.”

How is the procedure for issuing Aadhaar any different to flawed and corrupt procedures in issuing Ration Cards or NREGA job cards in India ?

Such Govt schemes are seen as mega opportunities for making a quick buck right from top to bottom. In a nation that has printed and sold Stamp Papers for many years and later stamped as “the Stamp Scam” ( http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/nic/stamp/index.htm ) it is no big deal to photo copy or reprint Aadhaar application forms, is it?.

At the top of the Aadhaar chain are Multi National Corporations like L1 Identity Solutions that even President Barrack Obama is openly backing by attending an Aadhaar Registration office along with L1 Identity Solutions staff.

At this point of time the gullible believe that the sooner they get their Aadhaar number sooner will their miseries disappear..

So the rush for Aadhaar is like the rush to get tickets to a cricket match. There is pushing and shoving and there are now touts who will get you a form and help you fill it out and speed up your place in the line, all for a price. If a tout or broker can easily get you a residential address which need not be verified, is it not a great opportunity for crooks to create new identities for themselves. Imagine two Nandan Nilekanis one Chief of Aadhaar who has a great identity and does not require an Aadhaar number and will not give his biometrics for privacy reasons and then we have a scamster who has misrepresented himself and taken out an Aadhaar as Nandan Nilekani. Not long before the price for an Aadhaar will depend on which celebrities name you want ? Sharuk Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Doni, Aish etc top the list..

Will Aadhaar give people the same excitement as an IPL match ? No way as Aadhaar promises nothing but a number and a bar code that will live on even after the person is dead and gone from this world.

Aadhaar is one mans dream and at best a good intention
Govt Policies need a lot more than good intentions, don’t they?

Read the full article in the blog http://aadhararticles.blogspot.com/2011/01/993-broker-menace-spoils-aadhaar-in.html

Let us hope in 2011 the Truth will Prevail and Aadhaar will be abandoned and remembered as another Indian scheme that failed and a scam

Ram 

T.SRINIVASA RAGHAVAN

Would it be a unique identity crisis ?  Bangalore Mirror

Aadhaar Article No 992 

  

Posted On Sunday, January 02, 2011 at 02:20:40 AM

The Unique Identification (UID) project is already up and running. It’s touted as a watershed in inclusive politics, of bringing people, who by virtue of physical remoteness, their station in society or other liabilities were excluded from the system, back into it. UID Chairman Nandan Nilekani recently said that the aadhaar number will not replace the passport, driving license or the voter identity card and that by 2014, 60 per cent of the country’s population will have the 12-digit UID number. The idea, though it has not been made explicit, is that Aadhaar will eventually become the key document for the common man to navigate the system, whether it is opening a bank account or making a rent agreement to booking a train ticket or applying for a job.


In fact, there is the implicit danger that sooner than later the original idea of inclusiveness could be turned on its head by denying benefits to people who don’t have the Aadhaar! “There is nothing to ensure that you will continue to receive the same benefits like those who have the UID number. The claim that it is not mandatory is legally correct.  But in practice it would not be,” said Prof Sridhar Krishnaswamy of W B University for Juridical Sciences.

It is a fundamental premise that data subjects ought to have “inalienable moral rights” about the “integrity” of the data collected about them. But even as UID is one of the best things that could have happened to deepen the democratic process in our society, the often un-remarked fact is that the project has also become the biggest industrial collector of personal information. Considering the size and heterogeneity of the Indian population, it becomes as big as Google, and the implications of this are quite frightening.  The UID draft bill, which has to be cleared by Parliament for it to become law, has only perfunctorily looked at the dangers posed by such huge and centralized collection of data. It glosses over the issue, content with making conservative noises about “the interlinking of databases”. This only shows how casual our policy makers, even the most enlightened of them, are towards the whole issue of safeguarding privacy.

The Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has analyzed the draft UID bill in considerable depth. They have identified three main areas where the bill needs to be drastically reworked: (i) plugging all loopholes which would enable corporate organizations from accessing information from the Aadhar database for their own commercial or R & D purposes; (ii) stipulating a maximum period for the data to be stored; (iii) to be transparent about the methods it uses to collect, store and disseminate data.

Prof Krishnaswamy agreed that the UID bill has not taken the corporate threat seriously enough. He contends that the UID authorities should take small, concrete steps that would act as effective safeguards. “In the mobile phone segment, user information is stored only for six months.  Now, the government is proposing a similar time cap for ISP too. But when it comes to UID there is no such time limit.  It means personal information could be held perpetually,” he explained. All that UID Assistant Director A K Pandey had to say to this was, “if that is it, then we have to live with it.”

Another worrying aspect of the proposed bill, according to Usha Ramanathan, an activist and expert on identity and digital issues, is its failure to fix accountability on the main players including enrollers, outsourcing companies, and the UDAI authority itself. “The data collector and data controller should be equally held responsible for the protection of data,” she said.  However, UID authorities themselves are of the view that the apprehensions are being overplayed. Pandey maintained that there was nothing in the UID that would compromise the privacy of individuals.  “You go to a bank or the LIC office and you give whatever information they ask you. But when it comes to UID alone you say the information you give could be dangerous.  We don’t quite understand this,” he retorted. He played down the fears that in the central data storage vital information could go corrupt. “We have taken adequate measures to protect it. We will have a backup,” he said.

The issue of transparency of data collection and storage remains. The CIS analysts feel that the UID should put out a synopsis of the algorithms it will use in collating and protecting data so that the public at large can be reassured of the firewalls that are in place. Then there is also the issue of not having concrete provisions in the UID bill to deal with special cases like whistleblowers and victims of abuse whose identities need to be protected even more carefully.

The UID authority also bypasses the question of whether it is confusing data protection with the larger issue of protection of privacy. A person’s identity is more than her date of birth, surname, religion, fingerprint or even the sum of these. Such information is basically data and allows governments or corporate bodies to provide a person a nominal identity, one that is indispensable if she is to be part of a socio-political system. The state and corporate entities conveniently deny a person her self, thereby reducing her to a subject instead of seeing each individual as a thinking, acting agency.

Be that as it may, right now the concern of civil society is to make at least protection of data as foolproof as possible. Aadhaar is just one of the projects that pose a threat to the privacy of individual citizens. There is the broader problem of how the Internet and mobile phones, the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and the widespread use of credit and debit cards has led to blatant misuse of personal information gathered online, sharing of consumer data without consent and the state’s own Big Brother surveillance. The need for an effective privacy law in India is imperative.