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

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

12965 - GADIRAJU NAGARJUNA: THE OPTIMISTIC GNOWGI - Mumbai Mirror


Mumbai Mirror | Updated: Feb 13, 2018, 12.03 AM IST

By Ramu Ramanathan

It is February 5 in the Supreme Court. Senior advocate Shyam Divan sums up his case in front of a nine-member bench. He makes two points about Aadhaar and what is at stake: 

First, personal autonomy. Are we going to cede complete control of the body to the state? 

The second point is about constitutional trust. We, the people, have created the state, and now the state deems us as unworthy unless we cede our biometerics. The Aadhaar programme treats the entire nation as presumptively criminal.

Shyam Divan has been at the forefront of the Aadhaar challenge since its origins in 2012, and has appeared in every hearing for the last six years. His main argument is that if this programme is allowed to roll on unimpeded, think of the domination the state will have over the individual. 

This is more or less what Dr Gadiraju Nagarjuna argued during the Rethink Aadhaar press conference in Mumbai in January. 

“Each linkage is a leakage! The more you link, the more will leak.” He adds, “Aadhaar is an enemy of democracy. This generates and supports centralised power to the government, service agencies and private corporates. The process is not audited, or could be audited by public. Instead of making government and service agencies more transparent, it makes the people transparent, violating the fundamental right of privacy and dignity of life.”

Nagarjuna, like Divan, is no ‘wine-andcheese liberal’. He is armed with a doctorate from IIT Kanpur, ‘the first PhD in the family’. These days Nagarjuna works on ‘the philosophy of science’ at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.

He was born in 1961 in Nagarjuna Sagar, where both his parents worked as clerks in the state PWD department of the hydro-electric dam construction project, in Andhra Pradesh. His grandfather selected the name of the Buddhist philosopher. He has vivid memories of seeing the statues of Nagarjuna that were excavated from the submerged water due to the dam construction. In 1967, when the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited the project to release water from the left and right bank canals, “it was a big event”. A four-year-old Nagarjuna went to “see the PM and attended the public meeting arranged next to the right bank”.

He joined HBCSE after a PhD at IIT Kanpur in 1995. His first project was to create an exhibition on the History of Science, the panels of which are still exhibited on the ground floor foyer of the centre. Nagarjuna reminisces, “I also used to teach graduate courses on History and Philosophy of Science. During this period I created the data centre for HBCSE from scratch using exclusively free software.”

In a way, the seeds were planted 28 years ago. Nagarjuna recalls, “It happened at IIT Kanpur, in the middle of one fateful night in 1989, while I was typing my term paper using GNU Emacs in the computer centre. As a curious student of philosophy I read the GNU Manifesto that night, which you can read through the menu of the Emacs editor. That turned me into a hacker and activist of the digital media.”

These days, the free software movement is a huge part of Nagarjuna’s life. He explains, “It is a global freedom struggle in the era of digital media; a cultural movement that spreads the value of sharing in the disguise of software development. Today, each one of us who works on a branded software not only pays, but also works for the company which makes proprietary software.”

Presently he is working on a book, New Science, New Media and Cognitive Science: Implications for education and society. Then there is a citizen science project to “map all the trees in India.” The modus operandi involves assigning serial numbers to the trees and to planting sites.

He explains, “Currently, postal departments all over the world use a very hierarchical way of locating a place. First we name a country, then a state, district, town, street, building and if you live in an apartment, the flat number, and then of course the person’s name. All this sounds very logical and politically correct. But in a world where there are several possessed boundaries. When such political boundaries do not exist, how would you locate yourself?” His solution, “Join treebook.in and map your tree anywhere in India.” And if you live in any other part of the world, send Nagarjuna’s team a request by naming the locality where you want to create a landmark tree, and they will create a tree mapping site for you.All this dovetails neatly into his mantra: Be a producer of knowledge, not a consumer.

In his spare time, he dabbles with Gnowgi. What is that? He chuckles. “Nothing serious”. Pronounced in rhyme with yogi, a Gnowgi is a person who not only does gnowing, but also preaches gnowing, uses exclusively gnoware (free software) and produces gnowledge (free knowledge). Can Nagarjuna be safely called, the optimistic Gnogwi? He responds, “I am optimistic about the future. Systems would restructure for a sustainable society. On cue, he hastens to add, “And this is not possible without active practice of freedomseeking actions.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Short takes

What is the best place in Mumbai: Under tree number 51, in the quadrangle of HBCSE in Mankhurd, where I spend most of my time working, talking, meeting friends, visitors and colleagues, arguing over cups of tea and coffee.

A day in Mumbai which you shall never forget: Several years ago, while on our way to CST from our office, my colleague and I interviewed an eight-year-old boy selling glossy, colourful picture books for children in the local train. Our interest was to check his arithmetic skills. His numeracy and communication skills were much better than the third grade school-going kids. Complex mathematical skills and reasoning could be acquired through living a close-to-life learning context, namely life itself. I gave the boy a fictitious name, Latif (my ‘Slumdog Millionaire’) and narrated bedtime stories about him to my son as a serial.

One event in Mumbai which cast an everlasting impression on you?
It is historic, but a disaster. The terrorist attack on November 26, 2008. I was returning from office to my home. The train stopped midway, close to Dockyard Road station at 10 pm. I managed to reach home with the help of a migrant taxi driver from Bihar after 11.30 pm. For the next 72 hours we were watching TV — and the live defence by our soldiers.


— (Ramu Ramanathan is a playwright, editor of PrintWeek and a Mumbaikar. This column appears here every fortnight)