Truth behind launch of 21st crore UID-Aadhaar number
Deceptive ‘voluntariness’ of UID-Aadhaar taking citizens, States &
parties for a ride by ‘vote buying’ through conditional e-payments
World Bank paper reveals the ulterior motive behind UID related schemes
New Delhi 19/ 10/2012: Biometric
data based 12 digit Unique Identification (UID)-Aadhaar Number linked welfare
schemes is being bulldozed with 2014 elections in mind with the ulterior motive
of altering voting behavior of the citizens by creating a ‘universal identity
infrastructure’ linked to ‘unified payment infrastructure’.
Ahead of next parliamentary
elections, with the launch of 21st crore UID-Aadhaar Number and Aadhaar Enabled
Service Delivery (AESD) on October 20, 2012 contemptuously ignores Parliament,
Parliamentary Committee, National Advisory Council and eminent citizens and the
lessons from the belated report from Planning Commission’s Group of Experts on
Privacy dated October 16, 2012. What is evident is that there is an open war
declared on sensitive personal information like biometric data which includes
finger prints, iris scans, voice prints, DNA samples etc. The fact is a centralized
electronic database of citizens and privacy, both are conceptually
contradictory.
The launch exercise of October
20, 2012 stands exposed because it is officially admitting that UID-Aadhaar is
mandatory contrary to what was claimed at its launch in Maharashtra on
September 29, 2010. The creeping of voluntariness into compulsion through
threat of discontinuance of services has been roundly castigated by Bhartiya
Janta Party (BJP) leader Yashwant Sinha headed Parliamentary Standing Committee
on Finance.
A revealing Policy Research
Working Paper titled ‘Conditional Cash
Transfers, Political Participation, and Voting Behavior’ brought out by
World Bank in October 2012 “provides empirical evidence to support the notion
that political participation and political views are responsive to targeted
transfers.” It notes that in Colombia, “During the 2010 presidential election
voters covered by FA (large scale conditional cash transfer) not only voted
more often, but also expressed a stronger preference (around 2 percentage
points) for the official party that implemented and expanded the program…
Another possible explanation is that FA (large scale conditional ash transfer)
was strategically targeted and motivated by clientelism and vote buying.” The
paper is attached.
On its website Unique
Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) continues to claim that UID-Aadhhar
is ‘voluntary’ and not ‘mandatory’. The million dollar question which Sonia
Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Nandan
Monohar Nilekani need to answer is: how can Aadhaar be deemed ‘voluntary’ if
service delivery is being made dependent on it. This is a grave breach of
public trust. This is a deliberate exercise in deception. The proposed ‘electronic transfers of
benefits and entitlements’ through ‘Aadhaar-linked bank accounts of the
beneficiaries’ is crafted to make it mandatory. The claim “Each Aadhaar number
will be unique to an individual and will remain valid for life. Aadhaar number
will help you provide access to services like banking, mobile phone connections
and other Govt and Non-Govt services in due course” is fraught with creating a
platform for convergence of government and corporate sector as is aimed by the
‘Transformational Government’ project of World Bank’s eTransform Initiative
launched in partnership with Governments of South Korea and France and six
transnational corporations like Gemalto, IBM, Intel, L-1 Identity Solutions
(now part of Safran Group), Microsoft and Pfizer.
This scheme is unfolding despite
the fact that Parliament has not passed the National Identification Authority
of India Bill (NIAI), 2010 proposed by the Indian National Congress led United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. It is noteworthy that Sinha headed
Parliamentary Committee in its report to the Parliament has rejected UID and
biometric data collection terming it as an illegal and an unethical project.
Corroborating citizens’ concerns,
the Parliamentary Committee has noted that the government has “admitted that
(a) no committee has been constituted to study the financial implications of
the UID scheme; and (b) comparative costs of the aadhaar number and various
existing ID documents are also not available.” The Committee expressed its
anxiety that, the way the project had been run, “the scheme may end up being
dependent on private agencies, despite contractual agreement made by the UIDAI
with several private vendors.”
The parliamentary rejection of
this scheme came in the aftermath of the Statement of Concern issued in the
matter of world's biggest data management project, Unique Identification (UID)
/Aadhaar Number scheme and related proposals like National Intelligence Grid by
17 eminent citizens led by Justice V R Krishna Iyer. The NIAI Bill, 2010 which was introduced in
the Rajya Sabha on December 3, 2010 after the constitution of the UIDAI and
appointment of Nilekani as its Chairman in the rank and status of a Cabinet
Minister without oath of secrecy. The Bill sought to provide statutory status
to the UIDAI which has been functioning without backing of law since January
2009. At present UIDAI is functioning without any legislative mandate.
One day ahead of the launch of
UID in Nandurbar District of Maharashtra on September 29, 2010, the statement
of eminent citizens had asked for the project to be put on hold till a
feasibility study was done, a cost: benefit analysis undertaken, a law of
privacy put in place and the various concerns of surveillance, tracking,
profiling, tagging and convergence of data be addressed. None of this has
happened till today. The Parliamentary Committee endorsed these concerns and
recognised that the project cannot carry on till this is set right. Many
countries UK, China, USA, Australia and the Philippines have abandoned such identity
schemes.
Nilekani, as a member or
chairperson of multiple committees of several ministries, has been trying to
push for the adoption of the UID, and for the re-engineering of current systems
to fit the does not meet the requirements of the UID. There have been attempts
to withdraw services such as LPG and other essential commodities if a person
has not enrolled for a UID. The state governments and citizens have been kept
in dark about the harmful ramifications of the world's biggest data management
project and how it linked with hitherto undisclosed other proposed legislations
and initiatives. The UID number and related proposals pose a threat to both
civil liberties as well as our natural resources like land as is evident from
Land Titling Bill and Nilekani’s book that aims to create a common land market
to reduce poverty.
Nilekani's promotion of Hernando
de Sotto's book 'The Mystery of Capital:
Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else' through his
own book Imagining India arguing that
national ID system would be a big step for land markets to facilitate right to
property and undoing of abolition of right to property in 1978 in order to
bring down poverty! Nilekani and the UPA government should be asked as to
explain the inexplicability of such assumptions.
Notably, such UIDs have been
abandoned in the US, Australia and UK. The reasons have predominantly been:
costs and privacy. In the UK, the Home Secretary explained that they were abandoning
the project because it would otherwise be `intrusive bullying’ by the state,
and that the government intended to be the `servant’ of the people, and not
their `master’. The Supreme Court of Philippines struck down a biometric based
national ID system as unconstitutional on two grounds – the overreach of the
executive over the legislative powers of the congress and invasion of privacy.
The same is applicable in India.
Not surprisingly, the
Parliamentary Committee observes, “The clearance of the Ministry of Law &
Justice for issuing aadhaar numbers, pending passing the Bill by Parliament, on
the ground that powers of the Executive are co-extensive with the legislative
power of the Government and that the Government is not debarred from exercising
its Executive power in the areas which are not regulated by the legislation
does not satisfy the Committee. The Committee are constrained to point out that
in the instant case, since the law making is underway with the bill being
pending, any executive action is as unethical and violative of Parliament‟s
prerogatives.” The committee also observed that a National Data Protection Law
is “a pre-requisite for any law that deals with large scale collection of
information from individuals and its linkages across separate databases. It
would be difficult to deal with the issues like access and misuse of personal
information, surveillance, profiling, linking and matching of data bases and
securing confidentiality of information etc.“
In a significant development
following rigorous deliberations, an Indian development support organization
founded in 1960, Indo-Global Social Service Society (IGSSS) disassociated
itself from UID Number project which was being undertaken under Mission
Convergence in Delhi. Withdrawal of IGSSS
that works in 21 states of the country merits the attention of all the states
and civil society organisations especially those who are unwittingly involved
in the UID Number enrollment process. In its withdrawal letter IGSSS said, “we
will not be able to continue to do UID enrolment…” It added, it is taking step
because ‘it's hosted under the rubric of UNDP's "Innovation Support for
Social Protection: Institutionalizing Conditional Cash Transfers" [Award
ID: 00049804, Project: 00061073; Confer: Output 1, Target 1.2 (a) & Output 3
(a), (b)]. In fact we had no clue of this until recently when we searched the
web and got this information.’
It is clear that both Mission
Convergence and UIDAI have been hiding these crucial facts with ulterior
motives. The letter reads, “IGSSS like many other leading civil society groups
and individuals are opposed to conditional cash transfers and the UID will be
used to dictate it.”
The Parliamentary
Standing
Committee considered the NIAI Bill, 2010 presented its report to the
Parliament
on December 13, 2011. The reported rejects biometric data based
identification
of Indians. The report is a severe indictment of the hasty and
`directionless'
project which has been "conceptualised with no clarity of purpose".
Even the functional basis of the Unique Identification Authority of
India UIDAI
is unclear and yet the project has been rolled out. The Standing
Committee
found the biometric technology `uncertain' and 'untested'. As early as
December
2009, the Biometric Data Committee had found that the error rate using
fingerprints
was inordinately high. In a recent interview to the press, the Director
General
and Mission Director of the UIDAI had admitted that fingerprints are
likely not
to work for authentication. The error rate could end up excluding up to
15% of
the population. It has also come to light that even iris scan keeps
changing
and is unreliable. Yet, the UIDAI has gone on with the exercise.
Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties (CFCL) had appeared before the
Parliamentary Committee to give its testimony on the UID BIll.
“I would have liked to make an
additional point about the perspective Adhaar reflects vis-a-vis governance of
our country and the conduct of our society. The only inference one can
reasonably draw is that the votaries of this idea expect the Indian state to
perpetually or for a long time remain in the ‘mai-baap’ role, personally taking
care of each of its needy children. Why else would we want to spend so much
money on a device only meant to enable the ‘mai-baap’ to correctly identify its
children?” said Deep Joshi, member, National Advisory Council (NAC) in a
message. Other NAC members like Aruna Roy has also been vociferously opposed to
centralization of governance through schemes like UID. Clearly, the views of
these members too have been ignored.
Besides influencing the voter
preference, once the Planning Commission’s Central Identities Data Repository
(CIDR) of 600 million citizens is ready by 2014 and the related National
Population Register (NPR) of the remaining 600 citizens is ready it will emerge
as a potential threat to minority communities of all sorts by some regime which
finds them unsuitable for their political projects.
So far the entire political class
has remained insensitive to the decision of the European Court of Human Rights
about violation of the right to privacy and citizens’ rights. The case was
heard publicly on February 27, 2008, and the unanimous decision of 17 judges
was delivered on December 4, 2008. The court found that the “blanket and
indiscriminate nature” of the power of retention of the fingerprints, cellular
samples, and DNA profiles of persons suspected but not convicted of offenses,
failed to strike a fair balance between competing public and private interests
and ruled that the United Kingdom had “overstepped any acceptable margin of
appreciation” in this regard. The decision is nonappealable.
Unmindful of this, in India,
National databank of biometric data is unfolding which is proposed to be linked
to electoral database amidst the political myopia of political parties in the
face of the onslaught of the foreign biometric and surveillance technology
companies. The only saving grace has been Parliamentary Standing Committee that
has taken on board studies done in the UK on the identity scheme that was begun
and later withdrawn in May 2010, where the problems were identified to include
"(a) huge cost involved and possible cost overruns; (b) too complex;(c)
untested, unreliable and unsafe
technology; (d) possibility of risk to the safety and security of citizens; and (e) requirement of high
standard security measures, which would result in escalating the estimated
operational costs."
It may be recalled that S.Y. Quraishi, the previous Chief
Election Commissioner had sent a dangerous proposal to Union Ministry of Home
Affairs asking it “to merge the Election ID cards with UID”. Such an exercise
would mean rewriting and engineering the electoral ecosystem with the
unconstitutional and illegal use of biometric technology in a context where
electoral finance has become source of corruption and black money in the
country. This would lead to linking of UID, Election ID and Electronic Voting
Machines (EVMs) which is not as innocent and as politically neutral as it has
been made out to be. It is noteworthy that all EVMs have a UID as well. In the
meanwhile, it is reliably learnt that voter registration in Manipur is
happening using biometric data. This makes a mockery of the recommendations of
the Parliamentary Committee on UID which notes that “The collection of
biometric information and its linkage with personal information of individuals
without amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955 as well as the Citizenship
(Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003,
appears to be beyond the scope of subordinate legislation, which needs to be
examined in detail by Parliament”.
Opposition parties at the centre and in the States appear
to be feigning ignorance about these attempts at re-plumbing the electoral
ecosystem and a complicit section of civil society seems guilty of practicing ‘the
economics of innocent fraud’.
The results of the October 2012 World
Bank paper find that “voters respond to targeted transfers and that these
transfers can foster support for incumbents”. The UID-Aadhaar and unified
payment infrastructure proposed is an act in designing political mechanisms to
capture pre-existing schemes for political patronage in spite of the absence of
‘legislative mechanisms’. It is apparent that non-UPA parties have been caught
unawares into implementing the program which is designed to their political
disadvantage.
For Details: Gopal Krishna, Citizens
Forum for Civil Liberties (CFCL), Mb: 9818089660, Phone: +91-11-2651781,
Fax:+91-11-26517814, E-mail:krishna1715@gmail.com
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