India’s Digital Governance `Model’ Fails on Rights

India's digital transformation also means depriving millions of their livelihood, biased surveillance technologies, insecure public databases and unprecedented levels of internet shutdowns. Jayshree Bajoria and Apar Gupta write.

https://www.justsecurity.org/88061/indias-digital-governance-model-fails-on-rights/

#DigitalIndia #g20 #MGNREGS #NREGA #aadhaar #ManipurViolence #manipur #InternetShutdown #UIDAI #biometrics #security #privacy #DataProtection #PersonalData #cybersecurity #StateSurveillance #authoritarianism #dissent #minorities #hindutva #BJP #technology #india

Gujarat: 2 lakh Aadhaar, PAN cards forged and sold; 2 arrested in Surat

The accused were accessing the government database, which is a case of illegal authorisation and a serious threat to national security, said a police official

https://thefederal.com/category/states/west/gujarat/gujarat-2-lakh-aadhaar-pan-cards-forged-and-sold-2-arrested-in-surat-95681

#gujarat #surat #aadhaar #PAN #AadhaarScams #UIDAI #identification #identity #data #security #india

1.2 crore MGNREGS workers will not be paid because they are not on Aadhaar-based wage system

The fourth extension for mandatory payments under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme via Aadhaar Based Payments System ends on August 31. As the numbers stand, out of the total 26 crore job card holders, 41.1% are still not eligible for this mode of payment. The Ministry of Rural Development has ruled out any more extensions, arguing that among the active workers, only 18.3% are ineligible.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/many-nregs-workers-out-of-aadhaar-based-wage-system/article67249057.ece

#MGNREGS #ABPS #aadhaar #RuralDevelopment #wages #labour #NPCI #UIDAI #assam #nagaland #india

Ten Reasons Why The Digital Personal Data Protection Law Doesn't Empower Citizens

Among the ten-point list of issues this Bill doesn't address is unchecked data collection by employees, the weakening of the RTI Act, and the sanctioning of a data protection board that will be beholden to those in power.

#DPDP #DataProtectionBill #PersonalData #RTI #transparency #DataProtection #aadhaar #StateSurveillance #privacy #FacialRecognition #biometrics #BigTech #authoritarianism #UIDAI #HumanRights #law #BJP #india

https://thewire.in/law/will-the-data-protection-law-empower-the-public

Tracking Life & Death: Changes To A 54-Year-Old Law May Exclude Millions Of Poorest Indians & States

Requiring birth certificates to be mandatory for all major life moves—marrying, voting, enrolling for school, getting a government job—will shut out the poorest people and states, given the unreliable state of India’s registration system.

#aadhaar #BirthsAndDeathsRegistrationBill #data #technology #exclusion #governance #poverty #WomensRights #StateSurveillance #privacy #UIDAI #india

https://article-14.com/post/tracking-life-death-changes-to-a-54-year-old-law-may-exclude-millions-of-poorest-indians-states--64c855e116cf0

Every political party in Andhra Pradesh wants voters’ privacy protected, but why can’t they have it?

- Srinivas Kodali @digitaldutta

It was the YSRCP that first demanded the protection voters’ privacy in Andhra Pradesh during the 2019 elections. The demand was made in the backdrop of TDP members getting caught with the Seva Mitra app, containing colour photos and 360-degree profiles of voters.

The political tides have changed. Now, the Jana Sena Party is demanding “My Data, My Right”, protesting against the Andhra Pradesh government’s village volunteers collecting personal data. The TDP, too, has joined in, demanding an end to 360-degree profiling. Then what is the problem with the voters’ privacy?

It was the TDP government from 2014 to 2019 that pioneered 360-degree profiling in Andhra Pradesh.

Retired bureaucrat J Satyanarayana, who was the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chairman and IT advisor to the Andhra Pradesh government, championed the cause of real-time governance and 360-degree profiling in the state.

But Andhra Pradesh was the second state to do the profiling.

Telangana had already started implementing it before Andhra Pradesh did with its Samagra Kutumba Survey and Integrated People Information Hub. Both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were the ground zero of these new experiments of pushing Aadhaar-based 360-degree profiling.

Imported model

This model of governance and push for Aadhaar is not native to India. It was primarily experimented in Estonia in Europe and later suggested to our bureaucrats to be adopted. The early experiment of the AP Smart Card project in 2006 under YS Rajasekhara Reddy was the precursor to the Aadhaar project, even before Nandan Nilekani adopted it to be enforced across the country.

United Andhra Pradesh was the laboratory to experiment with the implementation of new governance models and technologies because of globalisation and its IT sector’s place in global trade. The bureaucracy was open to experimenting with anything new in the population to be ahead in global supply chains.

There are many problems with Aadhaar-based 360-degree profiling and there has been large-scale opposition to it, resulting in the Supreme Court of India recognising the fundamental right to privacy.

The Aadhaar project itself was heavily restricted by the court, saying it should be used only for welfare. Yet, the government passed new laws and rules to push it, disregarding the Supreme Court judgements.

The nature of the Aadhaar project and 360-degree profiling allows the government to track citizens from birth to death. This was necessary for the government in a post-26/11 India, where the government wanted to know everyone in the country.

However, the threat to civil liberties was always on since this information can be misused, affecting electoral democracy.

The big player

The Aadhaar-Voter ID linking experiments in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh resulted in denying lakhs of voters the right to franchise in the 2018 Assembly elections in Telangana. It also resulted in Aadhaar profiles being used for electioneering at large.

Yet, these issues were ignored — and continue to be ignored and unacknowledged — because the Indian IT sector pushes towards a data economy. Everything from Aadhaar, UPI, Digital Locker, and CoWIN are being exported to other countries just the way they have been imported into India from Estonia.

Welfare was always used as an excuse to push technologies that the Indian IT sector could use to create a domestic IT economy. Even today, the biggest opposition to the Privacy and Data Protection Bill is from the Indian IT sector, not politicians.

At every level of the Aadhaar litigation, it was not only the government but the Indian IT sector also opposed a pushback.

A strict Data Protection Bill will address issues of government data collection and how data is affecting elections and electoral politics. But these have been ignored by allowing the government to have exceptions to collect as much data as it want to implement the rule of the law.

The present draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, is not good enough to protect the citizens’ rights and it is just a rubber stamp on all government projects. A Data Protection Bill respecting the Supreme Court’s verdict on Aadhaar and the fundamental right to privacy would not allow 360-degree profiling. The draft Bill envisages it.

The political opposition seen in Andhra Pradesh is necessary to make people understand the dangers of information and with successive pushbacks, the people may realise the larger problem irrespective of whose politics prevail. But notwithstanding the opposition to these systems, as long as they are not opposed nationally, they will remain the same way.

Wanted: Global demand

The TDP’s plan to draw the attention of Home Minister Amit Shah to the issue of 360-degree profiling in Andhra Pradesh is useless when the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) itself wants 360-degree profiling databases like NATGRID, CCTNS, and ICJS for surveilling the citizens.

Indians already have a fundamental right to privacy, but who will implement it when the governments at both the Centre and state support Aadhaar? No court can implement its order or get these systems changed unless there is a change in the technical architecture of the Aadhaar system.

For the moment, this will happen only if there is a global demand from countries that want to buy Aadhaar, to change its code and architecture to respect individual privacy. No matter how much Indians demand privacy, the current technical and governance setup does not allow any political party to change what is already built.

The MHA is introducing a Bill for amending the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969, in the ongoing Parliament session. The Bill seeks to link all major government databases at the Centre and state to build the National Population Register using Aadhaar as a unique ID. The Bill puts into law the idea of 360-degree profiling and allows the MHA to track citizens from birth to death, something that has been widely experimented with and accepted in Andhra Pradesh.

No amount of opposition will change the 360-degree profiling even though everyone knows it is bad. Every political party in power will continue to push it and oppose it when in Opposition. This is how the Indian state functions: Aadhaar is now part of statecraft.

[This article is published under Creative Commons Attribution – No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0). The article may be reproduced without permission].

...

#AndhraPradesh #privacy #PersonalData #DataProtection #aadhaar #UIDAI #UPI #CoWin #DigiLocker # #360degreeProfiling #TDP #JanaSena #SrinivasKodali #india

Job card-Aadhaar mismatch | A missing letter means no work for MGNREGS workers in Odisha

61 lakh workers, many genuine beneficiaries, have been deleted in 2023 alone for reasons ranging from unwillingness to work to fake job cards.

#odisha #MGNREGS #aadhaar #labour #labir #unemployment #DigitalIdentity #ABPS #UIDAI #governance #technology #india

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/job-card-aadhaar-mismatch-a-missing-letter-means-no-work-for-mgnregs-workers-in-odisha/article67005710.ece

Amit Agrawal, a 1993 batch IAS officer, took charge as Chief Executive Officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (#UIDAI), which administers #Aadhaar, on June 20.
https://trib.al/ZQ4EIkl #press

CoWin Fiasco Should Alert Us to Hidden Agendas Behind Digital Identity-Based Governance

While CoWin may have been promoted as the solution for vaccine management delivery, the idea was also to promote data sharing with the private sector for the digital health economy. The same model is being pushed across the globe by multilateral organisations.

#CoWinDataBreach #CoWin #cybersecurity #DataProtection #DigitalIdentity #aadhaar #UIDAI #UNDP #welfare #surveillance #privacy #HumanRights #exclusion #IndiaStack #india

https://thewire.in/tech/cowin-fiasco-should-alert-us-to-hidden-agendas-behind-digital-identity-based-governance

#NandanNilekani, co-founder and Chairman of Infosys and the founding Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (#UIDAI), has donated ₹315 crore to the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
https://trib.al/j1DC6QC #press

CoWIN breach: ‘No government in a developed country would have survived a data leak of this scale’

Anivar Aravind, a public interest technologist, explains why you should be worried about the CoWIN data leak and why the government should take responsibility.

#CoWinDataBreach #CoWin #DataBreach #privacy #cybersecurity #covid #aadhaar #DataProtection #UIDAI #telegram #UnionGovt #india

https://scroll.in/article/1050852/cowin-breach-no-government-in-a-developed-country-would-have-survived-a-data-leak-of-this-scale

CoWIN Data Breach: Citizens Must Be Allowed to Delete Personal Data from Govt Databases

The purpose for which CoWIN was created is over and there is no need for the government to maintain this health data anymore. Ideally, under the Right to Privacy judgement, we should be allowed to demand data deletions, writes Srinivas Kodali.

#CoWinDataBreach #CoWin #DataBreach #aadhaar #UIDAI #privacy #cybersecurity #DataProtection #RightToPrivacy #UnionGovt #rights #HumanRights #india

https://thewire.in/tech/cowin-data-breach-citizens-must-be-allowed-to-delete-personal-data-from-govt-databases

Narendra Modi Is Developing a New Template for Authoritarian Control of the Internet

Narendra Modi’s government has launched a relentless clampdown in a bid to suppress its critics. As part of this drive, it is developing new tools to stifle free expression on the internet while extending the reach of online surveillance over India’s citizens.

#NarendraModi #InternetSurveillance #surveillance #UPI #aadhaar #IndiaStack #biometrics #PersonalData #UIDAI #authoritarianism #democracy #privacy #dissent #hindutva #HinduNationalism #adani #bbc #india

https://jacobin.com/2023/06/narendra-modi-india-authoritarian-internet-surveillance-control/

Aadhaar-based MGNREGA payment causing delays in wages, non-disbursal

Workers contracted under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Telangana plan to stage state-wide protests against the new Aadhaar-based wage payment and app-based attendance systems.

#MGNREGA #MGNREGS #aadhaar #wages #labour #labor #employment #economy #NMMS #ABPS #UIDAI #UnionGovt #india

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/aadhaar-based-mgnrega-payment-causing-delays-wages-non-disbursal-178064

Centre asks states to get MGNREGS workers to switch to Aadhaar-based payment method

Activists have been resisting the move, saying that several of the workers under the employment scheme are not eligible for the payment method.

#MGNREGS #aadhaar #DigitalDivide #employment #labour #welfare #scheme #DataProtection #security #UIDAI #india

https://scroll.in/latest/1050307/centre-asks-states-to-get-mgnregs-workers-to-switch-to-aadhaar-based-payment-method

How crooks are exploiting gaps in Aadhaar system in Delhi

Delhi Police is learnt to have detected and flagged numerous vulnerabilities in the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)'s system.

These have allowed unscrupulous elements to exploit the Aadhaar service in various ways.These loopholes were discovered during investigation in some recent cases.

#delhi #aadhaar #DelhiPolice #data #privacy #security #identification #UIDAI #DataProtection #biometrics #india

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/how-crooks-are-exploiting-gaps-in-aadhaar-system-in-delhi/articleshow/98744284.cms

How An Aadhaar Fraud Forces The Poor Into Paying For Welfare Schemes They Do Not Want

Across India, banks are enrolling account-holders in social security schemes without their assent. Kiosk operators or banks’ business correspondents deceitfully obtain customers’ fingerprints for authentication via the Aadhaar-enabled Payment System, thus imposing the Narendra Modi government’s welfare schemes on the rural poor. Kiosk operators allege that banks pressurise them to enrol customers, by hook or crook, in the government’s life insurance, accident insurance and pension schemes.

#aadhaar #UID #identification #exclusion #DigitalDivide #welfare #poverty #privacy #banking #biometrics #security #PMJDY #PMSBY #governance #AEPS #UIDAI #MGNREGA #employment #UnionGovt #india

https://article-14.com/post/how-an-aadhaar-fraud-forces-the-poor-into-paying-for-welfare-schemes-they-do-not-want-63f57eb9e8d15

Aadhaar cloud on school midday meals

Policy experts and social activists said the fears were buttressed by the government’s diktat that the data must be uploaded on the Centre’s PM Poshan portal.

#aadhaar #MiddayMeal #UnionGovt #PMPoshan #data #education #nutrition #malnutrition #children #JeanDreze #MGNREGA #UID #UIDAI #india

https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/aadhaar-cloud-on-school-midday-meals/cid/1918070

How state family database projects pose dangers of in-depth citizen profiling and exclusion

These databases aim to be a “single source of truth” by having a complete profile of all residents ready with the government.

#UIDAI #aadhar #SFDB #MakkalID #SRDH #profiling #privacy #surveillance #DataProtection #StateGovts #india

https://www.medianama.com/2023/01/223-how-state-family-database-projects-pose-dangers-of-in-depth-citizen-profiling-and-exclusion/

myAadhaar - Unique Identification Authority of India | Government of India

https://myaadhaar.uidai.gov.in/verify-email-mobile

Gotta love this expensive 💩

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#Aadhaar
#UIDAI
#India