say no to fingerprint and iris based unique identity uid aadhaar and npr - part 2 Created: Feb 13, 2011 Last Update: Mon, April 11, 2011 @ 04:15 hrs IST
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/notouidnpr/ created on sat, feb 12, 2011
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/no-to-uid-npr-natgrid-fingerprint-iris-biometric-info/
http://www.petitiononline.com/nouidnpr/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPUdzvfmL3M
Implications of registering, tracking, profiling - The Hindu Monday, April 05, 2010
House listing operations for Census 2011 progressing well -  Front Page - The Hindu http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Cabinet-nod-to-UID-rollout-10-fingerprints-iris-to-prove-identity/articleshow/5946737.cms 
UID / Unique Identity / Aadhaar is an independent and a/an unique biometric database / janampathri / janamkundali of all persons above 05 years of age which will contain/have all 10 fingerprints, an iris scan and a photo (biometric profile). National Population Register (NPR) is a UID / Aadhaar linked biometric database / janampathri / janamkundali of all persons above 15 years of age.

A huge amount of personal information / data is being collected during / for Census 2011 to prepare a National Population Register (NPR) for all usual residents (citizens as well as non-citizens) by falsely claiming that the Census data and NPR data will be confidential. Census / NPR information / data will not be confidential / private.

UID (Unique Identity Card) or Aadhaar or biometric based national ID system targets all persons in India including kids who are between 05 to 15 years of age to prepare a biometric database / identification which will contain/have all 10 fingerprints, an iris scan and a photo (biometric profile) janampathri / janamkundali of all persons.

Census 2011 is a statutory exercise conducted / undertaken under the provisions of the Census Act 1948. Census Act 1948 enables the collection of information / data so that the state has a profile of the entire / whole population but without profiling the individual / individuals.

NPR is being carried out and created under the provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the Citizenship Rules (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards), 2003. Clauses / Provisions related to individual privacy in the Citizenship Act of 1955 were weakened / diluted through an amendment in 2003. Census respondents are being told that it is mandatory to submit personal / private information for the NPR. The Citizenship Rules cast every 'individual' and every 'head of family' in the role of an 'informant' who may be subjected to penalties if he does not ensure that every person gets on to the NPR, and keeps information about themselves and their 'dependents' updated.

Once the NPR data gets linked to the UID it (NPR) will become the UID / Aadhaar linked biometric database of all persons who are above 15 years of age.

The new government in UK after taking office in June 2010 scrapped its own UID project as it considered UID as 'intrusive bullying' by the state, and that the government intended to be the 'servant' of the people, and not their master. It promised to destroy all information held on its National Identity Register (NIR).

The intrusive bullying / harassment of all LPG consumers by the Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Department in Karnataka State through forced linking of LPG consumer numbers with consumers' electricity meters' Revenue Registration or RR Numbers and APL/BPL (Above/Below Poverty Line) ration card numbers is just an indication of worst/worse things that are yet to come if UID / Aadhaar is made compulsory as our personal biometric information can be accessed by any/countless number of central, state and private agencies like LPG distributors / dealers.

For God's sake please stop treating usual residents (citizens as well as non-citizens) of India as guinea pigs for the big / top corporates and other business entities / contractors to conduct biometric and non-biometric field and IT (Information Technology) trials and errors on the poor gullible human beings.

The dignity, honour, self-respect and privacy of all law-abiding Indian citizens including children / kids aged above 5 years are at stake / in danger. The state is sovereign vis-a-vis other states, but within the country it is the people who are sovereign (Janatha Janardhan). The digital sovereignty of India is in danger as the digital data is vulnerable to hacking.

Personal information of those registered for Census 2011, NPR and UID / Aadhaar could (God forbid) become public like the Radia Tapes.

Not all usual residents (citizens and non-citizens) can afford to go to the Supreme Court [like the superrich Corporate CEOs / Chairpersons / Heads (like Mr. Ratan Tata) and top politicians] if their privacy/privacies is/are (God forbid) infringed.

Therefore, we the petition signers / signatories request all the agencies / authorities / officials concerned to scrap the NPR, UID, NATGRID,.... as they intrude into the privacy of all law-abiding citizens.

This petition's been addressed to The Hon'ble Supreme Court, President, Prime Minister (PM), National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), State Human Rights Commissions (SHRCs), National Advisory Council (NAC), National Planning Commission (NPC), Union Ministry of Law, Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Union Ministry of Information Technology (MIT), Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), Registrar General & Census Commissioner, Members of Parliament (MPs), Governors (Guvs), Chief Ministers (CMs) and Members of Legislative Assemblies/Councils (MLAs/MLCs).

Yeh Public Hai Yeh Sab Jaanthi Hai - Kishore Kumar's song from 1974 Hindi film Roti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPUdzvfmL3M (applicable when all personal info / data becomes public like the Radia tapes)

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/say-no-to-uid-unique-identification/
http://www.petitiononline.com/notouid/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/ban-online-electoral-rolls-voter-lists/ 

Census 2011
It collects comprehensive/exhaustive data/information of/about 1.2 billion people. It is a statutory exercise conducted/undertaken under the provisions of the Census Act 1948. It asks for the names of usual residents and their parents, sex/gender, date and place of birth, present and permanent address, nationality, marital status, if ever married, name of spouse,.. People have to report to the state about who they marry, when they move house and where, what jobs they do, how much they earn, where they travel, what their pattern of expenditure is, and who they live with. Information on the building, quality of the building, facilities, assets possessed by the household and the facilities the household has,... Respondents are being told that it is mandatory to submit personal information for the National Population Register (NPR).

Census Act 1948
It enables the collection of information so that the state has a profile of the population but without profiling the individual/individuals. It's a 'confidentiality' provision.

National Population Register (NPR) database
All persons in India aged over 15 years are to be loaded on to a NPR database.

Citizenship Act of 1955
The Clauses related to individual privacy in the Citizenship Act of 1955 were weakened / diluted through an amendment in 2003. It's no confidentiality provision and information will not be confidential. The Citizenship Rules cast every 'individual' and every 'head of family' in the role of an 'informant' who may be subjected to penalties if he does not ensure that every person gets on to the NPR, and keeps information about themselves and their 'dependents' updated.

Census 2011 for the National Property Register (NPR)
Is being carried out and created under the provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the Citizenship Rules (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards), 2003. NPR data Links with UID database with the biometric identification, which would include a photograph and all eight fingers and two thumbs imprinted on it. UID number will be part of the NPR and the NPR cards will bear this number.

NATGRID database
It is consolidated from 21 categories of databases with Central and state government agencies and other organizations including UID / Aadhaar and NPR. It enables 11 security and intelligence agencies to access consolidated data. It's a convergence of all kinds of personal details including medical and financial information. It makes everyone's fingerprints available at the click of a mouse, that too with demographic information and all the rest. If any suspicious person books a flight/train ticket, or uses a cybercafe, or any of the services that will soon require an Aadhaar number, s/he will be on the radar of intelligence agencies. It can be accessed by the RAW, the IB, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the CBI, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB),...
It includes railway and air travel, income tax, phone calls, bank account details, credit card transactions, visa and immigration records, property records, and the driving licences of citizens

House listing operations for Census 2011 progressing well -  Front Page - The Hindu Monday, April 05, 2010
http://www.hindu.com/2010/04/05/stories/2010040561241000.htm 
Dr. Chandramouli India's Census Commissioner and Registrar General has contradicted his own statements several times on intrusion of privacy and breach of confidentiality in his/this interview to The Hindu Newspaper
Census Commissioner and Registrar General:
Data, except fingerprints, was already in the public domain as voters' identity cards and electoral rolls contained basic details as well as photographs. Certain information gathered for the NPR will be published in the local areas for scrutiny and invitation of objections like it is done for the electoral rolls. After disposal of objections and claims by registrars, the NPR data will be sent to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for de-duplication. The UIDAI, after filtering the data and weeding out duplication, will issue a 16-digit UID number.

The above four sentences incontrovertibly prove that no data is confidential and private as the Census Data, NPR and UID are all linked or interlinked or interdependent in one way or the other.

Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratified by India, an individual's right to privacy is protected from arbitrary or unlawful interference by the state. The Supreme Court has also held the right to privacy to be implicit under article 21 of the Indian Constitution (Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, 1994 and PUCL v. Union of India, 1996). The Copyright Act, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000, the Indian Contract Act and the Code of Criminal Procedure all place restrictions on the release of personal information.

Other Bills are in the offing such as Draft Land Titling Bill, 2010, Draft Paper on Privacy Bill, 2010, Draft DNA Profiling Act, 2007 and Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations (PIII) for a National Knowledge Network. The Land Titling Bill makes a provision for "Unique property identification number", linking UID Number with property.

Unique Identity / Identification (UID) / Aadhaar or biometric based national ID system It sill contain/have all 10 fingerprints, an iris scan and a photograph (biometric profile) janampathri / janamkundali of individuals including those of children between ages 5 and 15. It'll/It'd lead to profiling and function creep - information collected for one limited purpose but gradually gets used for other purposes. It'll have tax returns to bank records and SIM (subscriber identity module) registers. It entails tracking and profiling usual residents electronically through some 53 departments of the Government of India, 35 State/UT Secretariats and 603 District collectorates. Several countries (including the USA, the UK, Australia, China, Canada and Germany) have tried such projects and have given these up as impractical, unjustified and dangerous. The new government in UK after taking office in June 2010 scrapped its own UID project as it considered UID as 'intrusive bullying' by the state, and that the government intended to be the 'servant' of the people, and not their master. Theresa May, the UK Home Secretary said, "The national identity card scheme represents the worst of government. It is intrusive and bullying. It is ineffective and expensive. It is an assault on individual liberty that does not promise a great good. The government will destroy all information held on the national identity register, effectively dismantling it." The reasons cited by the UK government for rejection of the UID scheme - higher costs, impracticality and ungovernable breaches of privacy and civil liberties - are all valid in the Indian case as well.

UIDAI can authorise "any entity" to maintain its UID data, and that it can be accessed not only by intelligence agencies but also by any Ministry. UID Integrates vast amounts of personal data, that are available to government agencies with very few restrictions. The existing provisions for protection of privacy under Supreme Court judgements (PUCL versus Union of India) and the IT and Telegraph Acts, all three of which state that such orders for disclosure of personal information can be passed only by the Union or State Home Secretary have been diulted so that even a Joint Secy can pass such orders. Profile of any person resident in India can be built up by using UID as the key.

UID
It strengthens India's e-surveillance capabilities. It is a national security project in the garb of a social policy initiative. The UID project is fundamentally linked to "national security" concerns rather than "developmental" concerns. It is seemingly part of a larger effort to dismantle the PDS in India to complete the state's withdrawal from the sphere of food procurement and distribution.

Unique facility, or recipe for trouble? Opinion - News Analysis Jean Dreaze Thursday, Nov ember 25, 2010
http://www.hindu.com/2010/11/25/stories/2010112563151300.htm 
Benefits and services that are linked to the UID will ensure mandatory demand for the number. The Planning Commission's proposal for the National Food Security Act argues for "mandatory use of UID numbers which are expected to become operational by the end of 2010" (note the optimistic time-frame). No UID, no food. National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) assumes that "each citizen needs to provide his UID before claiming employment. Thus, Aadhaar will also be a condition for the right to work - so much for its voluntary nature. UID creates "the infrastructure of authoritarianism" - an unprecedented degree of state surveillance (and potential control) of citizens.
( The author is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Allahabad and Member of the National Advisory Council.)

Each of these (UID, NPR and Natgrid) has been given spurs by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), with security as the logic for the potential profiling, surveillance, reconnaissance, tracking, tagging and targeting of Indian residents and institutions by the state and its agencies. All this/these data/datas might be misused for undemocratic, illegal and unethical purposes. The benign promise of targeted welfare services is being held out to legitimise this exercise. The usual residents are being asked to accept that each of them be treated as potential terrorists, offenders, criminals and security threats, for that is the logic on which all these are based.

The intrusive bullying/harassment of LPG consumers by the Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs department in Karnataka State through forced linking of LPG consumer numbers with consumers' electricity meters' Revenue Registration or RR Numbers and APL/BPL (Above/Below Poverty Line) ration card numbers is just an indication of worst/worse things that are yet to come if UID / Aadhaar is made compulsory as our personal biometric information can be accessed by any/countless number of central, state and private agencies.

All 10 fingerprints, an iris scan and a photograph of the person will be used for unique identification (UID) of individuals including children between ages 5 and 15 - Times of India May 19, 2010
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Cabinet-nod-to-UID-rollout-10-fingerprints-iris-to-prove-identity/articleshow/5946737.cms

Implications of registering, tracking, profiling - Opinion - Leader Page Articles - Usha Ramanathan - The Hindu Monday, April 05, 2010
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article388037.ece
http://www.hindu.com/2010/04/05/stories/2010040554240800.htm 
All persons in India aged over 15 years are to be loaded on to a NPR database.

Data collection, including fingerprinting, for the National Population Register (NPR) has been launched alongside the 2011 Census exercise and under different statutes in India. This is no innocent data collection in a vacuum. It is set amidst NATGRID (National Intelligence Grid), the UID (the Unique Identification project), and a still-hazy-but-waiting-in-the-wings DNA Bank. Each of these has been given spurs by the Union Home Ministry, with security as the logic for surveillance and tracking by the state and its agencies. The benign promise of targeted welfare services is held out to legitimise this exercise.

The relationship between the state and the people is set to change dramatically, and irretrievably, and it appears to be happening without even a discussion about what it means. The NPR has been launched countrywide, after an initial foray in the coastal belt. All persons in India aged over 15 years are to be loaded on to a NPR database. This will hold not just their names and the names of their parents, sex, date of birth, place of birth, present and permanent address, marital status, nationality - and "if ever married, name of spouse" - but also their biometric identification, which would include a photograph and all eight fingers and two thumbs imprinted on it. This is being spoken of with awe, as the 'biggest-ever' census exercise in history. 1.2 billion people are to be brought on to this database before the exercise is done. This could well be a marvel without parallel. But what will this exercise really do?

If the Home Ministry were to have its way, NATGRID will enable 11 security and intelligence agencies, including RAW, the IB, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the CBI, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) to access consolidated data from 21 categories of databases. These would include railway and air travel, income tax, phone calls, bank account details, credit card transactions, visa and immigration records, property records, and the driving licences of citizens.

Sixty years should have been sufficient to get over being a 'subject' of the state, and to attain citizenship. The state is sovereign vis-a-vis other states, but within the country it is the people who are sovereign. All this, however, becomes empty talk when the people have to report to the state about who they marry, when they move house and where, what jobs they do, how much they earn, where they travel, what their pattern of expenditure is, and who they live with. And to make tracking easier, there are the fingerprints and the photograph.

While the Census is a statutory exercise conducted/undertaken under the provisions of the Census Act 1948, the NPR is being carried out and created under the provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the Citizenship Rules (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards), 2003. Why should that matter? Because there is an express provision regarding 'confidentiality' in the Census Act, which is not merely missing in the Citizenship Act and Rules but there is an express objective of making the information available to the UID Authority, for instance, which marks an important distinction between the two processes. Section 15 of the Census Act categorically makes the information that we give to the census agency "not open to inspection nor admissible in evidence." The Census Act enables the collection of information so that the state has a profile of the population; it is expressly not to profile the individual.

It is the admitted position that the information gathered in the house-to-house survey, and the biometrics collected during the exercise, will feed into the UID database. The UID document says the information that data base will hold will only serve to identify if the person is who the person says he, or she, is. It will not hold any personal details about anybody. What the document does not say is that it will provide the bridge between the 'silos' of data that are already in existence, and which the NPR will also bring into being. So with the UID as the key, the profile of any person resident in India can be built up.

Why is this a problem? Because privacy will be breached. Because it gives room for abuse of the power that the holder of this information acquires. Because the information never goes away, even when life moves on. So if a person is dyslexic some time in life, is a troubled adolescent, has taken psychiatric help at some stage in life, was married but is now divorced and wants to leave that behind in the past, was insolvent till luck and hard work produced different results, donated to a cause that is to be kept private - all of this is an open book, forever, to the agency that has access to the data base. Some would consider it demeaning to have this relationship with the state. For the poor, who often live on the margins of life and legality, it could provide the badge of potential criminality in a polity where ostensible poverty has been considered a sign of dangerousness. (This is not hyperbole; read the beggary laws, and the attitude of some courts reflected in the comment that 'giving land for resettlement to an encroacher is like rewarding a pickpocket.')

The Citizenship Rules cast every 'individual' and every 'head of family' in the role of an 'informant' who may be subjected to penalties if he does not ensure that every person gets on to the NPR, and keeps information about themselves and their 'dependents' updated. There isn't even an attempt at speaking in the language of democracy!

The arrangement that emerges is that the NPR will gather data and biometrics of the whole population. This does not guarantee an acknowledgement of citizenship; it is only about being 'usually resident.' This information will not be confidential, and will feed directly into the UID data base, which, while pretending to be doing little other than verifying that a person is who they say they are, will act as a bridge between silos of information that will help profile the individual. This will assist the market and, through NATGRID, the intelligence agencies, who will continue to remain unaccountable.

We (the usual residents) are asked to accept that each of us be treated as potential terrorists and security threats, for that is the logic on which this tracking and profiling of the individual is based.
[Usha Ramanathan the author is an independent law researcher who works on the jurisprudence of law, poverty and rights.]

House listing operations for Census 2011 progressing well -  Front Page - The Hindu Monday, April 05, 2010
http://www.hindu.com/2010/04/05/stories/2010040561241000.htm 
For the first time, the NPR of usual residents of the country will be created and the element of biometrics like fingerprints and photographs will be introduced.

"When we say 'usual residents,' it means citizens as well as non-citizens. Dr. C. Chandramouli, India's Census Commissioner and Registrar General told The Hindu.

Details to be kept confidential!?
Allaying apprehensions about intrusion in privacy through fingerprinting and photographs of all usual residents above the age of 15 years, Dr. Chandramouli said the data, except fingerprints, was already in the public domain as voters' identity cards and electoral rolls contained basic details as well as photographs.

(This means that the confidentiality has been  already breached and privacy has been already intruded / invaded by making the basic data/details of voters' identity cards and electoral rolls with photographs public.)

He asserted that the information collected about individuals would be kept absolutely confidential and would not be accessible even to courts of law.
(When this basic information/data including photographs of all usual residents was already in the public domain and can be accessed by anyone how can it be made inaccessible to the courts of law?)

"Certain information gathered for the NPR will be published in the local areas for scrutiny and invitation of objections like it is done for the electoral rolls. After the NPR has been finalised, the database will be used only within the government," he explained.
(Then where's the question of confidentiality of census 2011 data / information once it is published in the local areas for scrutiny and invitation of objections like it is done for the electoral rolls?)

After disposal of objections and claims by registrars, the NPR data will be sent to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for de-duplication. The UIDAI, after filtering the data and weeding out duplication, will issue a 16-digit UID number. "This UID number will be part of the NPR and the NPR cards will bear this number. The maintenance of the NPR database and updating it later will be done by the Office of Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India," Dr. Chandramouli said.

[This busts the myths that NPR and UID are independent of each other and UID is not mandatory/compulsory. On the contrary they (NPR and UID) are in fact interdependent on each other and are interlinked with each other and  in fact can't exist without each other.]

Too many unanswered questions on UID: expert - The Hindu Saturday, December 18, 2010
http://www.hindu.com/2010/12/18/stories/2010121854080700.htm 
Photo: M.A. Sriram

Doubts arise: The UID project is being pushed without Parliament's nod or a privacy bill policy in place.

Chittoor village gets into UIDAI The Hindu Tuesday, August 17, 2010
http://www.hindu.com/2010/08/17/stories/2010081756190400.htm
Kothapalyam first in the country to submit integrated details of its residents
Photo: K.V. Poornachandra Kumar

Unique exercise: A resident of Kothapalyam village near Tirupati gets his iris image registered as part of the nation-wide launch of the UIDAI project on Monday, August 16, 2010.

Top IT cos in fray for Aadhaar's mega tender Hindu Business Line - August 28, 2010
http://www.thehindubusinessline.in/2010/08/28/stories/2010082852770500.htm 
Big deal
About a dozen foreign and Indian players in race for UID's managed services contract
Market watchers say the size of the contract could be Rs 2,000-2,500 crore
The seven-year contract covers development of Central ID Data Repository, and procurement and installation of IT infrastructure among other functions


Aadhaar software locked in with 'Windows' - Front Page - The Hindu - Tuesday, Nov 02, 2010
http://www.hindu.com/2010/11/02/stories/2010110252270900.htm
Photo: AFP

The drivers for biometric devices are locked in with the Windows operating system platform.

Praful Bidwai: Questionable link
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2712/stories/20100618271209400.htm
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2712/index.htm 
Volume 27 - Issue 12 :: Jun. 05-18, 2010n India's National Magazine from the publishers of The Hindu
The UIDAI's plan to use population information compiled from Census 2011 data to generate the UID is fraught with dangers to individual freedoms and rights.

The pilot project of the UIDAI involved collection of biometric data of individuals, including iris information and fingerprints and photographs in various places.

When the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was launched in 2009, there was no debate on its purpose or clarity about what methods it would use to give each one of 1.2 billion Indians a 16-digit unique identity (UID) number.

Although its Chairman, Information Technology (IT) star Nandan Nilekani, was given Cabinet rank, the UIDAI was not placed under a Ministry but within the Planning Commission, a non-statutory body, which has increasingly appropriated power without public accountability.

Biometric data, including scans of both irises and all 10 fingerprints, will be used for each individual's UID. Even children between five and 15 years will be included "in view of the Right to Education".

The project is now riding piggyback on the Census-2011 enumeration, which has begun. The Census data will be used to prepare a National Population Register, which will compile detailed information on each individual under 15 heads, including name, sex, date of birth, parents' details, present and permanent address, marital status and "if ever married, name of spouse". It will include biometric data. According to Nilekani, the UIDAI will act as "the back-office of the NPR" by "de-duplicating" the collected data to generate the UID. As we see below, the UID-NPR-Census link is illegitimate.

There is no clarity about the project's purpose and the legitimacy of one of its principal functions: profiling citizens from whom the state is potentially at risk, to fight terrorism.

Nilekani insists it will be optional and concedes that legitimate claimants will be excluded from benefits if it is made mandatory. Yet, logically, its coverage must be comprehensive in order to be efficacious.

Security rationale
Its core rationale and primary purpose is much less lofty than its extravagantly claimed social benefits. It lies in security, surveillance and control - traceable to the idea of a mandatory Multipurpose National Identity Card for all Indians recommended by the Kargil Review Committee chaired by security hawk K. Subrahmanyam.

This committee seized the Kargil issue to drive a much larger "National Security State" agenda. Home Minister P. Chidambaram himself underscored the UID's security rationale by announcing the UIDAI's establishment in January 2009 as a timely response to the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

This rationale further unfolded with the government announcing a plan to set up a DNA databank and a NATGRID (National Intelligence Grid) connecting 11 agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, the Central Board of Excise and Customs and the Central Board of Direct Taxes.

Pivotal intermediary
The information generated by the NPR will be shared with the UIDAI and NATGRID. The DNA bank and NATGRID are meant to combat terrorism and other challenges to internal security. The UIDAI will be a pivotal intermediary between numerous agencies: the Registrar General (which conducts the Census), the Reserve Bank of India (which regulates commercial banks), and telephone and Internet providers, besides intelligence agencies. This is essential if the UID number is to be accepted as a proof of identity.

The UIDAI's database will be preyed upon by numerous agencies, Indian and foreign, commercial and governmental, security-related or involved in industrial espionage. Recently, researchers from the University of Toronto exposed a China-based computer espionage network that pilfered classified documents from India's Defence Ministry. The "compromised" installations included the Directorate-General of Military Intelligence; three Air Force bases; Indian Military Engineer Services in four places; a Mountain Artillery Brigade in Assam; two Indian military colleges; and Indian Embassy computers in Kabul, Moscow, Dubai, and Nigeria (see http://nytimes.com/2010/04/06/science/06cyber.html). Similarly, DNA databases can be corrupted, potentially victimising innocent citizens.

Nothing suggests that the UIDAI-related databases will be more secure than military networks. The estimated cost of creating and maintaining an enormous database of 1.2 billion citizens in India would exceed Rs.2 lakh crore, enormous for a poor country, where 70 per cent of the population has no toilets. This means forgoing increased provision of public services.

Violation of privacy
However, all these grave problems pale beside the UID's potential for invading citizens' privacy and violating constitutional freedoms. NATGRID will provide security agencies real time access into 21 categories of databases - including bank account details, credit card transactions, driving licences, and visa and immigration records. An intelligence official has been quoted as saying: "Once you feed in a person's name, you'll get all the details about him, across all databases." These include overdue traffic fines and credit card records. "There really will not be any secrets from the state."

The data collected would greatly exceed the need-based information that people furnish to different agencies to operate a bank account, obtain a passport or get a ration card. Now all this information will be pooled and made to converge in a single database available to hundreds of government departments at the click of a mouse.

This convergence means that the citizen will lose control over his/her personal information. Official agencies can use this information to track citizens' movements, bank transactions and other legitimate activities. This constitutes an impermissible intrusion by Big Brother into privacy, a fundamental right.

The NPR and NATGRID can track and profile individuals by studying transactions and patterns. The NPR is being compiled not under the Census Act but under the Citizenship Act, 1955. The Census Act guarantees confidentiality and says personal data is "not open to inspection nor admissible in evidence". Such protection is missing from the latter, which makes citizen registration "compulsory". The Census Act aims at capturing the profile of the population, not individuals. Profiling of individuals is liable to violate their freedom, privacy and confidentiality.

However, strangely, the UIDAI disowns all responsibility for how its database will be used. It openly declares it is in "the identity business". It states: "The responsibility of tracking beneficiaries and the governance of service delivery will continue to remain with the respective agencies." Also, - the UID number will only guarantee identity, not rights, benefits or entitlements-. This falsifies the key rationalisation offered for the scheme: namely, that the UID will break the barriers that prevent the poor from accessing public services/subsidies.

The Indian state's record of abusing technology and personal information is deplorable. Take the recent tapping of politicians' conversations by agencies using new "passive interception technology", which enables them to eavesdrop on all mobile communication within a 2-km radius. This led to an uproar in Parliament. But the government is planning to legalise the use of such equipment while short-circuiting the procedure for wiretapping under the Telegraph Act, which requires the approval of the Home Secretary and review by a high-level committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary.

The state has always tried to acquire extraordinary powers over citizens and then abuse them. One only has to recall the record of implementation of our preventive detention laws, TADA, POTA and the more than 200 other extraordinary laws such as the Public Security Acts of many States to be gravely concerned at the abuse potential. What India needs is not the UIDAI, but effective legislation to defend privacy and punish intrusion into it.

The intelligence agencies are not answerable to the public and are outside the purview of the Right to Information Act. We can never know what they know about citizens and how they interpret and use this information. The UID scheme and associated database-sharing will enable state agencies to know every minute detail of a citizen's life, but the citizen is barred from knowing what they know about him/her and what they do with that knowledge. This is a mockery of democracy.

This society is already paying heavily for the state's practice of the politics of suspicion, whose most extreme expression is "encounter killing". The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recently admitted that as many as 2,560 police "encounters" were reported to it between 1993 and 2006 - an annual average of 183. It found almost half  - 1,224, to be precise - to be "fake" or staged, that is, non-judicial executions.

The state behaves particularly roguishly when acting in the name of defending national security. Experience tells us that the key to fighting terrorism is to treat it as a crime and bring its perpetrators to book while addressing its root causes. What is needed is not more intrusive surveillance, nor more sophisticated electronic databases, but good, honest policing, patient collection of evidence and competent prosecution.

To put yet more draconian and unaccountable powers in the hands of the state is to write the charter of citizens' slavery. The UID project does exactly that. It must be uncompromisingly opposed. Or else, we will slide down the slippery slope of strangling people's freedoms and rights and using increasingly intrusive means to "discipline" citizens. Nothing can harm democracy more grievously.

What the UID conceals The Hindu Thursday, October 21, 2010 Opinion - Leader Page Articles
http://www.hindu.com/2010/10/21/stories/2010102153251200.htm 
Is identity the "missing link" in India's efforts to rise as an "inclusive" economic superpower? Can an identity-linked and technology-based solution change the face of governance in India? Given the euphoria around the Unique Identification (UID) project, one is tempted to believe so. However, a careful look at the project would show that the euphoria is just hyperbole; only the politically naive can afford to ignore the far-reaching implications of this Orwellian project.

One can summarise the criticisms of the UID project under four heads. First, the project would necessarily entail the violation of privacy and civil liberties of people. Second, it remains unclear whether biometric technology - the cornerstone of the project - is capable of the gigantic task of de-duplication. The Unique Identification Authority of India's (UIDAI) "Biometrics Standards Committee" has noted that retaining biometric efficiency for a database of more than one billion persons "has not been adequately analysed" and the problem of fingerprint quality in India "has not been studied in depth". Third, there has been no cost-benefit analysis or feasibility report for the project till now. Finally, the purported benefits of the project in the social sector, such as in the Public Distribution System (PDS), are largely illusive. The problem of duplicate ration cards is often hugely exaggerated. Even so, some States have largely eliminated duplicate ration cards using "lower" technologies like hologram-enabled ration cards.

In this larger context, the UID project has two distinct political dimensions. The first dimension is that the project is fundamentally linked to "national security" concerns rather than "developmental" concerns. In fact, the marketing team of the UIDAI has always been on an overdrive to hush up the security angle, and play up the developmental angle, to render it more appealing.

The first phase of today's UID project was initiated in 1999 by the NDA government in the wake of the Kargil War. Following the reports of the "Kargil Review Committee" in 2000, and a Group of Ministers in 2001, the NDA government decided to compulsorily register all citizens into a "National Population Register" (NPR) and issue a Multi-purpose National Identity Card (MNIC) to each citizen. To ease this process, clauses related to individual privacy in the Citizenship Act of 1955 were weakened through an amendment in 2003. In sum, the ground work for a national ID project was completed by 2003 itself.

The parallels between the UPA's UID and the NDA's MNIC are too evident to be missed, even as the UPA sells UID as a purely "developmental" initiative. The former chief of the Intelligence Bureau, A.K. Doval, almost gave it away recently, when he said that UID, originally, "was intended to wash out the aliens and unauthorised people. But the focus appears to be shifting. Now, it is being projected as more development-oriented, lest it ruffle any feathers".

The potential of the project to unleash a security frenzy is the reason why privacy concerns have to be taken seriously. The government and the UIDAI have made it appear as if the purported, and unsubstantiated, benefits of "good governance" from the project eclipse the concerns regarding privacy and civil liberties. This is where the problem lies. A foundational understanding in the study of individual freedoms, pioneered by scholars like Amartya Sen, is that consequence-independent absolute rights are rather hard to defend. Hence, the demand to trade-off one freedom for another (here, the "invasive loss" of privacy for "development") is an untenable demand. Each freedom, independently, has an instrumental value, and the loss of one freedom undermines the individual's overall capability to expand up on other freedoms. No wonder then that Sen himself has voiced the privacy concern regarding the UID project.

There is a related concern: police and security forces, if allowed access to the biometric database, could extensively use it for regular surveillance and investigative purposes, leading to a number of human rights violations. As Amartya Sen has argued elsewhere, forced disclosure and loss of privacy always entailed "the social costs of the associated programmes of investigation and policing". According to him, "some of these investigations can be particularly nasty, treating each applicant as a potential criminal."

The second dimension of the UID project is the following: it would qualitatively restructure the role of the state in the social sector. Contrary to claims, the UID project is not an instrument to expand India's social security system, for whatever it is worth. Instead, the aim is to keep benefits restricted to the so-called "targeted" sections, ensure targeting with precision and thereby, limit the government's expenditure commitments. None other than the Prime Minister has made this amply clear. Addressing the National Development Council (NDC) on July 24, 2010, he noted: "to reduce our fiscal deficit in the coming years, ... we must [be] ... reducing the scale of untargeted subsidies. The operationalisation of the Unique Identification Number Scheme ... provides an opportunity to target subsidies effectively."

The UIDAI claims that UID would help the government shift from a number of indirect benefits into direct benefits. In reality, such a shift would represent the opposite: a transformation of the role of the state from a direct provider to an indirect provider. For the UIDAI, the UID is a tool of empowerment. In reality, the UID would be an alibi for the state to leave the citizen unmarked in the market for social services. Nowhere is the illustration more telling than in the case of the PDS.

The UID project is part of a larger effort to dismantle the PDS in India. The aim is to ensure a back-door entry of food stamps in the place of PDS, and later graduate it to a cash transfer scheme, thereby completing the state's withdrawal from the sphere of food procurement and distribution.

According to the UIDAI, the most important benefit from the UID could be that you could have a "portable" PDS. In other words, you could have a system where you (say, a migrant worker) could buy your PDS quota from anywhere in India. The claim, of course, has a deceptive appeal. One would have to dig deeper to grasp the real intent.

If we take the present fair price shop (FPS) system, each FPS has a specified number of households registered to it. The FPS stores grains only for the registered households. The FPS owner would not know how many migrants, and for what periods, would come in and demand their quota. Hence, for lack of stock, he would turn away migrant workers who demand grains. Hence, the FPS system is incompatible with the UID-linked portability of PDS. There is only one way out: do away with the FPS system, accredit grocery shops to sell grains, allow them to compete with each other and allow the shop owners to get the subsidy reimbursed. This is precisely what food stamps are all about; no FPS, you get food stamps worth an amount, go to any shop and buy grains (on why food stamps are deeply problematic, see Madhura Swaminathan, "Targeted Food Stamps", The Hindu, August 3, 2004).

What is interesting is that everyone, except those enamoured by the UID glitter, appears to know this. On its part, UIDAI officially accepts that food stamps become easier to implement with the UID. So does the Planning Commission, which sees the UID as the fulcrum around which its plans to "reform" the PDS revolve. It turns out that an opposition to the dismantling of PDS, and to food stamps, also involves an opposition to the UID.

On his part, Nandan Nilekani has been showcasing his extraordinarily poor understanding of India's developmental priorities. According to him, "in the Indira years, the slogan was garibi hatao. Then it was roti, kapda, makaan. In the last few years, it was bijli, sadak, pani." However, these slogans are "passe"; the in-thing is the slogan "UID number, bank account, mobile phone." Such an inverted world view, totally divorced from the grim realities of poverty, has prompted critics to call AADHAAR as just NIRAADHAAR!

In conclusion, the UID project is marked by both "security" and "developmental" dimensions. The former leads to an invasive state; the latter leaves us with a retreating state. Either way, the "citizen" is worse off.
( R. Ramakumar is with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.)

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