Author: Shankkar Aiyar
By design, governments are supply-driven. Decisions on investment, expenditure and welfare programmes are propelled by forecasts, estimates enabled by demographics and assumptions – even if it does not always pan out as predicted.
The target audience was not at all monolithic. There was India I, which was largely urban, about 100 million in population, which would ask why they should queue up for one more identity card. There was India II, small-town India, which was combative and aspirational, small-town India, the kind that is producing new startupreneurs, comprising around 400 million. India III was largely dependent on the government to survive.
UPA I and II, the Manmohan Singh government was very keen on improving financial inclusion. Nearly two-thirds of Indians did not have bank accounts, or as the government and bankers say.
A lesser politician would have found it tough to mobilise consensus in the face of such stiff opposition. But Mukherjee, who has had a ring-side view of history and power politics since the 1960s, is regarded across party lines as the encyclopaedic
Like his father, Rahul Gandhi is invested in pet peeves and pet projects. One pet project was to fix the broken system of education.
Dr Singh explained, ‘I had this idea to use technology to promote development. I thought, considering his work and the fame he had earned in the use of technology, it would be better if we inducted
The tech team and the private consultants initially operated out of Bengaluru from a makeshift office in a fourth-floor apartment in Palm Retreat Towers on Outer Ring Road, before moving into a proper office on Sarjapur Road.
This public–private partnership of skill sets was important, and it was possible only because, even at the very beginning, the chairperson and the CEO
We think the corporate sector is transparent. Actually, the government is far more so – and that is how the checks and balances play out.’
Expectedly, given the general nature of labour in India, a large number of people have bald fingers; they have no registrable or recognisable fingerprint.
The concept patent of Florn and Safir had expired in 2008 and the Daugman method patent was due to expire in 2011. In the course of discussions with Ganga and the finance team, Nilekani told them not
to worry about the cost. ‘Prices will drop and costs will come down.’
The twelfth digit is an instrument for detecting data entry errors. The system is similar to the one deployed in credit cards and uses what is called the Verhoeff Scheme.
The de-duplication process, Viral Shah points out, involves matching every fingerprint and iris scan with everyone who was already on the system. At a billion plus people,
It seemed operators were scanning the eyes upside down, leading to the switching of left and right eye images.
know-how needs know-who.
‘There was a perception among some senior leaders in the party that there should be a review of the programme of Direct Benefit Transfer of subsidies for LPG. They felt that this
Modi was known to have an aversion for back-channels; both RSS and BJP party bigwigs knew this. Modi owned and Modi ran the Modi Sarkar.
As the chief minister of Gujarat, his favourite haunt, when he had the time, was the Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geo-Informatics. Under him the Gujarat government harnessed space technology to propel groundwater management by using data to pinpoint where water bodies could be created, and for an SMS service telling fishermen where schools of fish were located and for how long.
The government could have leveraged technology to create a virtual bank. It could have converted the 12-digit Aadhaar number into a bank account number, defined it as an Aadhaar account in the cloud, and allowed people to choose who they wished to bank with. That is, they could choose to bank through a variety of financial service providers, whether a mobile phone company, a post office or a bank.30 However, the traditional route was trod, thanks to resistance from bankers and from within the Reserve Bank of India as well.
Awadh Behari Rohatgi, a former Delhi High Court judge, Rohatgi had represented the Gujarat government in the Supreme Court in the 2002 Gujarat riots case. He had other high-profile cases and corporate clients to his name, and was known for his
The United Nations in its report on sustainable development goals titled ‘Leave No One Behind’ said, ‘The decision of India in 2010 to launch the Aadhaar programme to enrol the biometric identifying data of all its 1.2 billion citizens, for example, was a critical step in enabling fairer access of the people to government benefits and services.’
The Modi government had sucked out over Rs 15.4 trillion of a total of Rs 16.9 trillion of currency in circulation: roughly 87 per cent of all cash in the system.
A law on privacy that will help preserve the uniqueness of personhood.
The essence of the many articulations is that either by a systemic flaw or by an executive fiat, that is, by accident or by design, personal data could be outed, as it was possible to connect
the various databases to create identifiable profiles and this could result in tracking or targeting of individuals and violation of rights.
It is critical that we do not exacerbate systemic issues which end up punishing the innocent.
The road ahead requires governments to understand that Aadhaar cannot be a cure-all potion for all the ills that afflict governance. The responsibility for
ensuring capacity and capability, and enforcing accountability falls squarely on Central and state governments.
In May 2017, four Pakistani citizens in Bengaluru were found to be in possession of Aadhaar cards which they had procured for Rs 300, so as to get ration cards and other documents.11 The Bengaluru incidents exposed the influence of cash ’n carry, or the daily corruption
Pakistani citizens in Bengaluru were found to be in possession of Aadhaar cards which they had procured for Rs 300, so as to get ration cards and other documents.
This means that all the places where the Aadhaar number is seeded would have to be brought under one data-mining exercise for
‘If we have learned anything in this last year of Watergate, it is that there must be limits upon what the Government can know about each of its citizens.