Now, glasses that block facial-recognition software
February 1, 2013 at 3:12 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffNow, glasses that block facial-recognition software
IANS | Jan 23, 2013, 05.52 PM IST
A newly-designed pair of glasses dubbed “privacy visor” can reportedly thwart hidden cameras using facial-recognition software
LONDON: A newly-designed pair of glasses dubbed “privacy visor” can reportedly thwart hidden cameras using facial-recognition software, BBC reported.
The prototype spectacles have been designed by scientists at Tokyo’s National Institute of Informatics.
The glasses are equipped with a near-infrared light source that “confuses” the software without affecting vision.
Law enforcers, shops and social networks are increasingly using facial-recognition software.
“As a result of developments in facial recognition technology in Google images, Facebook etc and the popularisation of portable terminals that append photos with photographic information… essential measures for preventing the invasion of privacy caused by photographs taken in secret and unintentional capture in camera images is now required,” said university professor Isao Echizen.
Echizen said the glasses, which connect to a pocket power supply, would be reasonably priced, but there are some simpler alternatives.
According to an online guide by hacker group Anonymous, heavy make-up or a mask will also work, as will tilting your head at a 15-degree angle, which fools the software into thinking you do not have a face.
BBC said that in November, it emerged some shop mannequins in Italy were collecting data on shoppers using facial-recognition software.
The EyeSee mannequin logs the age, gender and race of passers-by through a camera hidden behind one eye.
Don’t make PF hinge on Aadhaar: Trade unions
February 1, 2013 at 3:11 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffDon’t make PF hinge on Aadhaar: Trade unions
Prasad Nichenametla, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, January 24, 2013
Central trade unions have slammed a move by the Employees Provident Fund Organisation to make Aadhaar mandatory for opening new PF accounts and continuing existing ones. The Unique Identification Authority of India has also said that the 14-digit number should be optional till the entire country is covered.
The EPFO, which manages the PF accounts of employees in organised employment, had earlier this week issued an order that makes Aadhaar numbers compulsory for new employees joining the formal sector from March 1, 2013, to open EPF accounts. Employees with existing EPF accounts should submit their Aadhaar numbers by June 30, 2013, the circular states. As of now, there are over six crore existing accounts with EPF.
“Such an order is absurd, and given the status of Aadhaar enrolment across the country, totally impractical. We oppose any such move by the EPFO,” said DL Sachdeva, AITUC national secretary and member, Central Board of Trustees — the governing body of EPF.
Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the biggest union, also said it opposes the order. “We are against linking it to Aadhaar. We will take up the issue in the CBT meet next month,” Girish Awasthi, ex-president BMS and a CBT member, said.
EPF officials said the move is aimed at streamlining account management, transfers and claims disbursals. Analysts, however, say it will cause many difficulties.
“Making Aadhaar mandatory would be erroneous till a saturation stage is reached. Lack of Aadhaar should not deny anyone any service,” a senior official said.
Only 30 crore of the population has been registered till now, and most of them are in non-formal employment.
Don’t make PF hinge on Aadhaar: Trade unions
February 1, 2013 at 3:10 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffDon’t make PF hinge on Aadhaar: Trade unions
Prasad Nichenametla, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, January 24, 2013
Central trade unions have slammed a move by the Employees Provident Fund Organisation to make Aadhaar mandatory for opening new PF accounts and continuing existing ones. The Unique Identification Authority of India has also said that the 14-digit number should be optional till the entire country
is covered.
The EPFO, which manages the PF accounts of employees in organised employment, had earlier this week issued an order that makes Aadhaar numbers compulsory for new employees joining the formal sector from March 1, 2013, to open EPF accounts. Employees with existing EPF accounts should submit their Aadhaar numbers by June 30, 2013, the circular states. As of now, there are over six crore existing accounts with EPF.
“Such an order is absurd, and given the status of Aadhaar enrolment across the country, totally impractical. We oppose any such move by the EPFO,” said DL Sachdeva, AITUC national secretary and member, Central Board of Trustees — the governing body of EPF.
Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the biggest union, also said it opposes the order. “We are against linking it to Aadhaar. We will take up the issue in the CBT meet next month,” Girish Awasthi, ex-president BMS and a CBT member, said.
EPF officials said the move is aimed at streamlining account management, transfers and claims disbursals. Analysts, however, say it will cause many difficulties.
“Making Aadhaar mandatory would be erroneous till a saturation stage is reached. Lack of Aadhaar should not deny anyone any service,” a senior official said.
Only 30 crore of the population has been registered till now, and most of them are in non-formal employment.
Report of the Expert Group to Recommend the Detailed Methodology for the Identification of Families Living Below Poverty Line in the Urban Areas
February 1, 2013 at 3:07 pm | Posted in Policy, Public Documents | Comments OffReport of the Expert Group to Recommend the Detailed Methodology for the Identification of Families Living Below Poverty Line in the Urban Areas
Unions Oppose EPFO’s Move to Make Aadhaar Mandatory
February 1, 2013 at 2:59 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments Offhttp://news.outlookindia.com/items.aspx?artid=787953
Unions Oppose EPFO’s Move to Make Aadhaar Mandatory
New Delhi | Jan 25, 2013
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Trade Unions have raised red flag against the retirement fund body EPFO’s suo moto decision to make submission of Aadhaar mandatory for its over 50 million existing subscribers and new members.
Questioning the decision of the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), the trade union leaders said that it would be impossible for the members to provide Aadhaar numbers as the scheme was not operational in many parts of the country. Also it was cumbersome to get the numbers in states where the scheme is operational.
“They should not have taken this decision suo moto. It should have been discussed in the EPFO’s apex decision making body the Central Board of Trustees (CBT)”, Bhartiya Majdoor Sangh General Secretary Baij Nath Rai told PTI.
Rai who is an EPFO trustee also, further said, “It cannot be done outrightly as there are a lot of hiccups in making Aadhaar number in many parts of the country.”
EPFO has recently gave direction in its order to its field staff to mandatorily ask for Aadhaar numbers from new members joining the scheme from March 1, 2013 and existing members by June 30.
Another EPFO trustee and All India Trade Union Congress Secretary D L Sachdev has outrightly opposed it saying that EPFO does not need to use Aadhaar number as unique account number of its members.
“We are opposing this move. All members do not have Aadhaar numbers. They should make it voluntary,” he said adding that EPFO can give unique account number of all members without using the Aadhaar number and platform.
Sachdev who is also an EPFO trustee said that AITUC would raise the issue with Labour Minister as well as take it up in the CBT meeting on February 15. (MORE)
Admitting that having Aadhaar number of all EPFO members
is a herculean task, another EPFO trustee and Hind Mazdoor Sabha Secretary A D Nagpal said, “I do not think that this could be done by June 30. We will ask for extension of the deadline in the forthcoming meeting of CBT next month.”
Earlier, EPFO had envisaged replacing its members’ account number with Aadhaar numbers to avoid inconvenience to those who had to apply for transfer of PF money to the new account with the new employer.
EPFO is working towards creating a central database where all members would have a unique account number and would not require to transfer PF accounts to another one in the event of changing jobs.
EPFO recently digitalised its database of regional offices and launched its e-passbook service where subscribers can access their account online. Now the body is working towards integrating this digital data base and bring them together at one place.
This will help EPFO members, particularly construction workers, who often change their jobs or contractors.
Move to make Aadhaar mandatory opposed
February 1, 2013 at 2:58 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments Offhttp://www.deccanherald.com/content/307774/move-make-aadhaar-mandatory-opposed.html
Move to make Aadhaar mandatory opposed
New Delhi, Jan 25, 2013, PTI:
Trade unions have raised red flag against the retirement fund body EPFO’s suo moto decision to make the submission of Aadhaar mandatory for its over 50 million existing subscribers and new members.
Questioning the decision of the Employee s’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), the trade union leaders said that it would be impossible for the members to provide Aadhaar numbers as the scheme was not operational in many parts of the country.
Also it was cumbersome to get the numbers in states where the scheme is operational.
“They should not have taken this decision suo moto. It should have been discussed in the EPFO’s apex decision making body the Central Board of Trustees (CBT),” Bhartiya Majdoor Sangh General Secretary Baij Nath Rai said.
Rai who is an EPFO trustee also, further said, “It cannot be done outrightly as there are a lot of hiccups in making Aadhaar number in many parts of the country”
Confused over Aadhaar, Cabinet clears GoM
February 1, 2013 at 2:57 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffConfused over Aadhaar, Cabinet clears GoM
TNN | Feb 1, 2013, 01.48 AM IST
READ MORE UID Confusion|National Population Register|GoM On UID|Aadhaar Card|Praful Patel
A tussle over who will collect and store data saw a compromise being worked out with the task being divided between UID and NPR.
NEW DELHI: Confusion over whether the unique identity number is a number, a card or both, and concerns over UID and the National Population Register duplicating functions prompted the Cabinet to refer UPA-2′s ambitious project to a group of ministers.
The Cabinet discussion on Thursday revealed that the ministerial panel was not immune from contradictory and blurred perceptions about Aadhaar, as UID is known, with some ministers saying they had received a card along with a number.
Those who voiced doubts about UID’s format included coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal, minister for social justice and empowerment Selja, minister for heavy industry Praful Patel and railway minister Pawan Bansal.
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Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, who has been fielded along with finance minister P Chidambaram to project Aadhaar-linked benefits, made the point that the UID was essentially a number. This is the correct position as the card provides a number that is to be linked to the database establishing identity.
Ramesh’s remark that the UID number could be supplied through a mobile phone, however, saw oil minister M Veerappa Moily point out that rural populations may not be conversant with the technology. Moily is understood to have remarked that was himself yet to figure out everything about a mobile.
Differences persisted as concern was also expressed over duplication or overlap between the National Population Register (NPR) and the UID. Both processes involve similar collection of biometric data including iris scans.
With the scheme involving a Rs 5,000 crore rollout in the initial stage, it was felt the proposal be subjected to a more detailed examination by a GoM.
Chidambaram is understood to have pointed out that it will be NPR that will matter rather than the UID. The minister seems to have referred to the population register being a record that can indicate citizenship rather than being a biometric database.
A tussle over who will collect and store data saw a compromise being worked out with the task being divided between UID and NPR. The somewhat complicated truce meant that those covered by UID will need to also register with NPR. On the other hand, persons covered by NPR do not need to register afresh with UID.
The database is expected to be eventually stored by the UID authority as it is seen to have developed backend linkages that make Aadhaar an effective instrument to verify identity.
The project envisages a UID number being used to instantly match the biometrics stored by the authority to verify the identity of a person. This is intended to allow simpler access to services such as banking while allowing direct transfer of certain benefits like scholarships and pensions.
Aware of the politically tricky ground of UID being used to establish nationality, the authority’s brief states that it must collect data about persons who are usually residents of India. The objective was to first get a fix on numbers, including illegals.
PM sends resident ID card scheme to GoM
February 1, 2013 at 2:56 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments Offhttp://www.indianexpress.com/news/pm-sends-resident-id-card-scheme-to-gom/1067783/
PM sends resident ID card scheme to GoM
Swaraj Thapa Posted online: Fri Feb 01 2013, 02:53 hrs
New Delhi : The ambitious Rs 5,500 crore proposal to issue resident identity cards to the entire population above 18 years of age under the National Population Register — which in the past had clashed with the Aadhaar scheme under UIDAI on ground that they had similar objectives — on Thursday failed to find Cabinet approval following which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh referred it to a Group of Ministers (GoM).
Cabinet ministers displayed their lack of knowledge on the subject when during the discussions, many members said they thought that Aadhaar was merely a number given to an individual and not an actual card. Other members like Heavy Industries Minister Praful Patel, Railway Minister Pawan Bansal and Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Kumari Selja intervened to say that they had been handed Aadhaar cards after their fingerprints and iris scans were taken. These ministers, however, confessed they were not aware if the card issued to them had a microchip carrying information about their personal details.
The discussion then shifted to whether the duplicity of having an Aadhaar number as well as a resident identity card in the form of a smart card carrying personal information was really necessary and if it meant unnecessary burden on government exchequer to the tune of Rs 5,500 crore as an initial investment. Some members pointed out that both resident ID card as well as Aadhaar had similar objectives and it was only logical if the two initiatives were merged.
In between, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh contended that even smart cards would be outdated soon and the mobile phone would become the information carrying interface relating to identity of an individual. Petroleum Minister Veerappa Moily, however, differed with him strongly telling Cabinet members that it would be too tall a task to expect a person from rural background to be familiar with mobile phone operations as an information interface. He cited his own example saying that his knowledge about operating his handphone was limited.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who as home minister had backed the resident identity card, made a strong pitch for Cabinet approval to the scheme on the ground that the resident ID card was important in the context of security concerns. Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde too pitched in, even adding that some fake cards had been issued under UIDAI.
With the lack of consensus, The PM decided to send the subject to a GoM. Sources said either Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar or Defence Minister AK Antony could head the GoM.
IT firms like TCS, Infosys & Wipro losing work as MNCs’ captive centres are back into fashion
February 1, 2013 at 2:55 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffIT firms like TCS, Infosys & Wipro losing work as MNCs’ captive centres are back into fashion
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A combination of factors, including higher scrutiny by regulators in the US and Europe, and a desire for tighter control of intellectual property, is resulting in multinational corporations increasingly relying on their own units in India.
A recent example of the change of course is the move by Allstate Corp, one of the largest insurers in the US, to set up its own facility in Bangalore, resulting in a shrinkage of work for TCSBSE 0.37 %, Infosys and Wipro. The $32-billion (Rs 1.7 lakh crore) company carved out portions of the contracts it had awarded to India’s top three software companies and decided to carry out the work itself.
“The level of regulatory oversight has certainly increased visibly in the recent past, especially in the banking, financial services and insurance space,” said KS Viswanath, senior vice-president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies ( Nasscom), the body that represents India’s $100-billion IT services and business process outsourcing sector.
Starting from the mid-1990s, captives were an important proving ground for the offshore outsourcing model for many global corporations.
70 Captive Units Set Up
Once they discovered that India offered the benefit of low cost and an abundant talent base, many of them, among them Citi and UBS, gradually relinquished their captives and handed out their technology operations to be managed by Indian service providers.
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Besides heightened regulatory activity in the US in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, two recent incidents involving Standard Chartered Bank and HSBC, where outsourcing was blamed for critical compliance breaches, have also contributed to greater vigilance by clients.
A recent report by the Everest Group said last year, around 70 captive centres were set up, most of them new facilities.
US-based accounting and advisory Grant Thornton, Barclays, online trading and trading platform company Trade Station Group and Zurich Insurance Group are also either setting up new centres or expanding their existing facilities in India, according to people familiar with the developments.
Chetan Garga, managing director and country head at Allstate’s India centre, said as the large technology outsourcing contracts signed 7-10 years ago are now coming up for renewal, corporations have an opportunity to re-examine what they want to give out versus what to keep in-house.
The level of satisfaction with the quality of work being done by service providers weighs heavily on such decisions, he said.
Any opportunity lost is particularly painful for Indian service providers because the industry is fighting harder for contracts while the size of the global market remains more or less unchanged. But this does not mean that there will be wholesale transfer of work to captives or that there is an imminent threat of a sharp drop in offshore outsourcing.
With over 700 captives that employ 5 lakh professionals, India houses critical technology hubs for some of the largest corporations in the world. While these centres do not disclose their revenues, industry experts estimate the value of work delivered from these captives to be $12-13 billion in the last financial year.
“In last couple of years, these centres have evolved into doing more IP-driven work, including risk analytics and customer analytics,” said Nitin Seth, country head at Fidelity Worldwide Investment.
“There is rethinking now around the whole make versus buy paradigm, with CIOs now trying to strike the right balance between work done in-house and outsourced to vendors,” said Fidelity’s Seth.
Analysts are also questioning assumptions around outsourcing being cheaper than doing work internally, especially in a captive model. Everest argues that total cost of ownership is lower for captives than service providers on account of relative advantages in accessing skills and shorter learning curve.
P Chidambaram thinks Aadhar is “just a number”. But Sharad Pawar say, “It’s a card.”
February 1, 2013 at 2:52 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments Offhttp://www.rediff.com/news/report/upa-a-cabinet-of-ignorance-on-aadhaar/20130131.htm
UPA : Union Cabinet of Ignorance!
Last updated on: January 31, 2013 23:50 IST
Believe it or not, Prime minister Manmohan Singh [ Images ]’s Cabinet is unable to arrive at consensus on the exact identity of AADHAAR — Unique Identification Number (UID).
Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram [ Images ] thinks it’s “just a number”. He is correct. But Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar [ Images ], Railway Minister Pawan Bansal and many other ministers say, “It’s a card.”
The Union Cabinet that met on Thursday, reportedly, displayed a sensational lack of knowledge about their own ideas, plans and its execution. The question was, probably, worth Rs 5,500 crore.
When the Cabinet met on the issue of harmonising the AADHAAR and National Population Register’s exercise and the need for a Resident Identity Card, an unbelievable situation arose.
The country’s most powerful people, sitting on both sides of Dr Singh, on the high table of power, could not decide if AADHAAR is a card or merely a number and as a result they could not approve the budget needed to take the issue further.
During the debate, on the pros and cons of the resident ID card in the Cabinet, even Dr Singh was moved to ask, “Do we really need it?” So much confusion arose among the mighty men that the Union Cabinet had to send the issue to a Group of Ministers to sort it out.
It was surprising for many present to see that the cerebral political entity and even a trained lawyer such as Chidambaram didn’t know that many of his colleagues have gone through the biometrics exercise and got a card that they call the Aadhaar. He was, reportedly, taken by surprise when so many ministers told him that they had gotten “the card”.
He insisted that AADHAAR is merely a number and not an ID card, says a source privy to the event.
At one point, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh [ Images ] butted in to say that there was no need of a ‘card’ for the identity of a resident of India [ Images ] because citizens can get and store the ‘identify number’ on their mobiles.
Veerappa Moily [ Images ], the man of wisdom and more, got provoked. He taunted Jairam that he (Moily) is not able to handle his own mobile phone and expects villagers to use mobile phones to show their identification number. Jairam meekly quoted the millions of mobile connections that are in use in India.
The wise men of India are confused because the brand name of the Unique Identification Number project is Aadhaar. At same time the government has initiated the creation of the National Population Register by collecting specific information from all residents in the country during the house listing and housing census phase of Census 2011 from April 2010 to September 2010, according to the NPR’s website.
NPR data comes under the Union home ministry and AADHHAR is handled by a specially created body under the Planning Commission in 2009. It is headed by Infosys [ Get Quote ] co-founder Nandan Nilkeni.
The turf war going on between the NPR and AADHHAR is compounding confusion at the highest level and even among a billion plus Indians.
Gopalkrishna, member of Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties, who gave testimony before the parliamentary standing committee on finance that rejected the UID Bill, says, “It’s not surprising that Cabinet ministers are confused. The Aadhaar advertisement in Imphal has shown that it is a card, although, it is not. The UID Authority of India has been misleading citizens.”
He says, “Chidambaram is right in this case. What appears as a card is deceptive because only the 12-digit number, which printed on the so-called card, is of relevance. It is this 12-digit number which is part of a central database of UID/Aadhaar that acts an identifier, and not as an identity card.
Beware of the bugs
February 1, 2013 at 2:50 pm | Posted in Critical Perspectives | Comments OffBeware of the bugs
In early July last year, a staffer at the secretive National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) noticed odd “signals” on his monitoring system. Using complex algorithms that NTRO had been developing since 2010, he categorised these signals as a precursor to a major cyber attack. The agency, run under the Prime Minister’s Office, immediately sent a warning up the chain of command. Inexplicably, the warning went unheeded. That mistake would result in the single-largest cyber attack ever carried out against India.
On July 12, several high-level officials reported their emails had been hacked into. This included officials from the Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Home Affairs, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the paramilitary unit deployed along much of the country’s 3,500 km border with China. The hackers even breached the main National Informatics Centre email server, which serves all government departments. An investigation put the total number of hacked accounts at roughly 12,000.
The scale of the breach may suggest that the hackers were trying to steal any information they could lay their hands on, but NTRO officials believe otherwise. “Ministries like Panchayati Raj, Women and Child Development, and Statistics were not touched. The hackers focused on the ones with secrets,” says a senior NTRO officer on condition of anonymity. “They stole secret information such as deployment locations of troops and communication between ITBP (commanders) and home ministry officials.”
Officials say while any number of countries could be after secrets from the foreign and home ministries and DRDO, only one would be interested in ITBP – China, with which India has a long-running boundary dispute that even led to a brief, but bloody, war in 1962.
Cyber security experts believe most cyber attacks on India are from groups based in China. But India is not the only one on these hackers’ radar. The United States is also probing hacking incidents by Chinese groups. One example was the hacking of Lockheed Martin’s futuristic F-35 stealth fighter programme. It is widely believed that the hackers stole design features which ultimately helped China with its J-20 and J-31 stealth fighter programmes.
China denies such allegations. A spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in New Delhi told Business Today in an email that China opposes hacker attacks and has made laws to ban them. “China is also one of the main victims of hacker attacks… China is ready to continue its cooperation with the international community aimed at ensuring cyber security,” the spokesperson said.
The damage cyber attacks can cause was spelt out by US President Barack Obama in an article in The Wall Street Journal in July last year. “In a future conflict, an adversary unable to match our military supremacy on the battlefield might seek to exploit our computer vulnerabilities here at home,” he wrote, arguing for stringent cyber security legislation. “Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis. The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency… the loss of electricity can bring businesses, cities and entire regions to a standstill.”
Indeed, such attacks have already been carried out. On April 27, 2007, Estonia ground to a halt when its parliament, ministries, banks and media suffered a wave of cyber attacks. Russia was the main suspect, considering the attacks took place around the same time Estonia decided to relocate a Soviet-era war memorial. Again, in August 2008, Georgia’s government and media websites were knocked offline and phone lines jammed at just the time it went to war with Russia over South Ossetia.
Some of the world’s biggest companies have also been victims of cyber attacks. In August 2012, Saudi Aramco, the Gulf kingdom’s national oil producer, reported an attack that damaged 30,000 computers on its network.
Though the attackers did not reach their intended target – the company’s production network – it is not difficult to imagine the global consequences of a disruption in supply from the world’s largest oil exporter. Can India thwart such attacks on its critical infrastructure such as transport and communications networks, oil refineries and nuclear power plants? Is the government even taking this threat seriously?
In December, Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth told a conference of Chief Information Security Officers of important ministries that “the government is fully conscious of the threat to our cyber space”. Privately, cyber security experts called this lip service. They point to the mass email hacking of last year, which used a technique called a “Zero Day” (see The Zero Day Nightmare on the next page). Zero Day attacks are unstoppable, but what worsened matters, say investigators, is that most systems did not have updated security software.
Until recently, the responsibility for shielding the country from cyber attacks devolved on the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), set up under the Department of Information Technology in 2004. Since then, the number of reported cyber security incidents – phishing, defaced websites, network breaches, virus attacks – has grown from 23 to 13,301 in 2011 (see Worrying Trend). Experts say the actual number may be 10 times higher as most victims either do not know or do not admit their systems were hacked into.
In July last year, the government split CERT-In’s responsibilities so that serious threats were not lost in the deluge of minor issues. CERT-In now protects cyber assets in non-critical areas while a new body called the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) protects assets in sensitive sectors such as energy, transport, banking, telecom, defence and space.
But, despite the growing threat, India spends aminiscule amount on cyber security . The budgetary allocation towards cyber security (including CERT-In) is Rs 42.2 crore ($7.76 million) for 2012/13, up 19 per cent from Rs 35.45 crore in 2010/11. In comparison, the US plans to spend several billion dollars through the National Security Agency, $658 million through the Department of Homeland Security and $93 million through US-CERT in 2013.
“Indian agencies don’t have enough resources. Their budget should be at least 10 times bigger if they have to function properly,” says Subimal Bhattacharjee, a cyber security expert and former India head of the USbased information systems giant General Dynamics.
Information Technology Secretary J. Satyanarayana admits that more work needs to be done in areas such as capacity building and research and development. But he says the US cyber security budget cannot be compared with India’s. “The US has massive IT infrastructure and needs more money to protect that.”
Satyanarayana says the department is in an advanced stage of finalising the national cyber security policy. Among other things, the policy proposes to minimise the dependence on foreign IT products and to produce indigenous security solutions.
The government also plans to appoint a National Cyber Security Coordinator in the National Security Council to coordinate with all agencies dealing with cyber security.
India has so far not suffered any major economic or physical damage because of cyber attacks, but that does not mean its defences are strong. In January 2012, for instance, NTRO officials alerted the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to serious vulnerabilities in its cargo management system at Chennai, Coimbatore, Kolkata, Amritsar, Lucknow and Guwahati airports. Weak passwords and outdated operating systems were the main problems. These six airports handled 311,000 metric tonne of international cargo in 2010/11. A single day’s disruption would have sent 853 tonne of cargo to
the wrong destinations.
“The economic impact would have been immense had the systems been penetrated by unscrupulous elements,” says P.K. Kapoor, Executive Director (Information Technology), AAI. NTRO followed up its alert with a fullscale assessment of India’s air traffic control (ATC) system and advised, among other things, installing closecircuit TV cameras in ATC rooms.
India’s telecom network is equally vulnerable. Dhruv Soi, founder of information security firm Torrid Networks, recalls a recent assignment to test the networks of one of India’s largest telecom operators. He says his team got complete control of the company’s billing system within a week. It also found that the back-up server containing important data had weak passwords and was protected by flawed software. “We targeted this server and were able to control almost everything,” adds Soi.
Weak passwords also allowed hackers to breach the server and deface the website of the Pune-based Indian Railways Institute of Civil Engineering last August. “There are plenty of free tools available online that help hackers crack passwords easily,” says Vijay Devnath, General Manager (Infrastructure and Security), Centre for Railway Information Systems.
The damage was limited because the website is not frequently visited. It could have been worse. “Once a server is compromised, it gives easy access to other connected servers,” says Rajshekar Murthy, who runs the Gurgaon-based cyber security firm Orchidseven. Had the hackers breached the rail traffic management system, they could have sent trains crashing into one another.
If train accidents sound scary, imagine another Bhopal – or Chernobyl – like industrial disaster. State-run Nuclear Power Corporation of India is a constant target for hackers. “The company faces up to 10 targeted attacks a day but manages to block them all,” says Executive Director S.P. Dharne. If even one attack succeeds, the country could face a nuclear emergency.
Government agencies are not the only targets; even companies such as the Kolkata-based ITC have suffered cyber attacks. According to a July 2012 report by Bloomberg, Chinese hackers possibly had access to ITC’s network for a year. It also said cyber thieves hacked into the computer of ITC Chairman Y.C. Deveshwar’s personal assistant and stole several documents including tax filings. An ITC spokesman told Business Today that the company was “informed of a possible hacking attempt” of an independent computer. “The computer in question did not contain any critical information about the company nor did it have access to any such information,” he said. “Our IT security systems are constantly reviewed and updated to protect against such possible attacks.”
Some threats come from within India. In 2007, the IT team of a Chennai-based drug maker detected heavy traffic on servers connected to its research lab. The company was developing an anti-asthma molecule, and it suspected that a hacker was stealing the research data. Unable to trace the hacker, the company approached Mahindra Special Services Group (MSSG), a security consulting firm, part of the Mahindra & Mahindra group. MSSG experts placed a dummy file containing a virus on the company’s R&D folder that appeared to contain research data, says Dinesh Pillai, MSSG’s CEO.
“When the hacker returned, he went straight for the dummy file and we traced him using the virus,” he says. The hacker turned out to be a 29-year-old Chandigarh resident who was hired by a rival drug maker. Experts say India remains highly vulnerable to cyber attacks on its critical infrastructure. “I do not even know the command and control system for dealing with cyber attacks in the country,” says Pillai.
M.S. Vijayaraghavan, an adviser to NTRO, says all cyber security agencies are working in isolation. “If there is a synchronised attack on multiple critical infrastructure facilities, they are not in a position to join the dots and respond in a well-coordinated way,” he says. But, he adds, the formation of NCIIPC is changing that as the entire critical infrastructure has now come under its purview.
Indeed, NCIIPC is worried about thwarting the next big attack. Business Today asked NCIIPC officials to describe how India would face a Stuxnet-style attack on a nuclear power plant (see Repulsing Attacks). Stuxnet was a virus created in a joint US-Israeli operation against Iran that destroyed over 1,000 nuclear centrifuges, setting Tehran’s atomic programme back by at least two years.
“The cyber threat landscape has changed in the past five years. The threat of a Stuxnet-like attack on critical infrastructure will grow in the future,” says Unmesh Deshmukh, Director (Security Suites Sales), Asia Pacific and Japan, at IT security solutions provider Symantec. In coming years, private companies will matter greatly in India’s critical infrastructure as they control more and more assets in telecom, transport, energy, and banking and finance. In five years, NCIIPC hopes to have 500 cyber experts. But estimates by government and private agencies say the country needs 100 times that number.
Vijayaraghavan believes meeting such a target is possible. “That number may sound large, but remember, there is no college degree in hacking. There are thousands who do it as a hobby and we can connect with them.”
Sanjay Katkar, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of security software provider Quick Heal Technologies, says India needs more public-private interaction to secure its cyber space. “We require more collaboration between private companies and educational institutions to develop talent,” he says. “We need more cyber warriors and need to be ready for the cyber war.”
In early July last year, a staffer at the secretive National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) noticed odd “signals” on his monitoring system. Using complex algorithms that NTRO had been developing since 2010, he categorised these signals as a precursor to a major cyber attack. The agency, run under the Prime Minister’s Office, immediately sent a warning up the chain of command. Inexplicably, the warning went unheeded. That mistake would result in the single-largest cyber attack ever carried out against India.
On July 12, several high-level officials reported their emails had been hacked into. This included officials from the Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Home Affairs, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the paramilitary unit deployed along much of the country’s 3,500 km border with China. The hackers even breached the main National Informatics Centre email server, which serves all government departments. An investigation put the total number of hacked accounts at roughly 12,000.
The scale of the breach may suggest that the hackers were trying to steal any information they could lay their hands on, but NTRO officials believe otherwise. “Ministries like Panchayati Raj, Women and Child Development, and Statistics were not touched. The hackers focused on the ones with secrets,” says a senior NTRO officer on condition of anonymity. “They stole secret information such as deployment locations of troops and communication between ITBP (commanders) and home ministry officials.”
Officials say while any number of countries could be after secrets from the foreign and home ministries and DRDO, only one would be interested in ITBP – China, with which India has a long-running boundary dispute that even led to a brief, but bloody, war in 1962.
Cyber security experts believe most cyber attacks on India are from groups based in China. But India is not the only one on these hackers’ radar. The United States is also probing hacking incidents by Chinese groups. One example was the hacking of Lockheed Martin’s futuristic F-35 stealth fighter programme. It is widely believed that the hackers stole design features which ultimately helped China with its J-20 and J-31 stealth fighter programmes.
China denies such allegations. A spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in New Delhi told Business Today in an email that China opposes hacker attacks and has made laws to ban them. “China is also one of the main victims of hacker attacks… China is ready to continue its cooperation with the international community aimed at ensuring cyber security,” the spokesperson said.
The damage cyber attacks can cause was spelt out by US President Barack Obama in an article in The Wall Street Journal in July last year. “In a future conflict, an adversary unable to match our military supremacy on the battlefield might seek to exploit our computer vulnerabilities here at home,” he wrote, arguing for stringent cyber security legislation. “Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis. The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency… the loss of electricity can bring businesses, cities and entire regions to a standstill.”
Indeed, such attacks have already been carried out. On April 27, 2007, Estonia ground to a halt when its parliament, ministries, banks and media suffered a wave of cyber attacks. Russia was the main suspect, considering the attacks took place around the same time Estonia decided to relocate a Soviet-era war memorial. Again, in August 2008, Georgia’s government and media websites were knocked offline and phone lines jammed at just the time it went to war with Russia over South Ossetia.
Some of the world’s biggest companies have also been victims of cyber attacks. In August 2012, Saudi Aramco, the Gulf kingdom’s national oil producer, reported an attack that damaged 30,000 computers on its network.
Though the attackers did not reach their intended target – the company’s production network – it is not difficult to imagine the global consequences of a disruption in supply from the world’s largest oil exporter. Can India thwart such attacks on its critical infrastructure such as transport and communications networks, oil refineries and nuclear power plants? Is the government even taking this threat seriously?
In December, Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth told a conference of Chief Information Security Officers of important ministries that “the government is fully conscious of the threat to our cyber space”. Privately, cyber security experts called this lip service. They point to the mass email hacking of last year, which used a technique called a “Zero Day”. Zero Day attacks are unstoppable, but what worsened matters, say investigators, is that most systems did not have updated security software.
Until recently, the responsibility for shielding the country from cyber attacks devolved on the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), set up under the Department of Information Technology in 2004. Since then, the number of reported cyber security incidents – phishing, defaced websites, network breaches, virus attacks – has grown from 23 to 13,301 in 2011 (see Worrying Trend). Experts say the actual number may be 10 times higher as most victims either do not know or do not admit their systems were hacked into.
In July last year, the government split CERT-In’s responsibilities so that serious threats were not lost in the deluge of minor issues. CERT-In now protects cyber assets in non-critical areas while a new body called the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) protects assets in sensitive sectors such as energy, transport, banking, telecom, defence and space.
But, despite the growing threat, India spends a miniscule amount on cyber security. The budgetary allocation towards cyber security (including CERT-In) is Rs 42.2 crore ($7.76 million) for 2012/13, up 19 per cent from Rs 35.45 crore in 2010/11. In comparison, the US plans to spend several billion dollars through the National Security Agency, $658 million through the Department of Homeland Security and $93 million through US-CERT in 2013.
“Indian agencies don’t have enough resources. Their budget should be at least 10 times bigger if they have to function properly,” says Subimal Bhattacharjee, a cyber security expert and former India head of the USbased information systems giant General Dynamics.
Information Technology Secretary J. Satyanarayana admits that more work needs to be done in areas such as capacity building and research and development. But he says the US cyber security budget cannot be compared with India’s. “The US has massive IT infrastructure and needs more money to protect that.”
Satyanarayana says the department is in an advanced stage of finalising the national cyber security policy. Among other things, the policy proposes to minimise the dependence on foreign IT products and to produce indigenous security solutions.
The government also plans to appoint a National Cyber Security Coordinator in the National Security Council to coordinate with all agencies dealing with cyber security.
India has so far not suffered any major economic or physical damage because of cyber attacks, but that does not mean its defences are strong. In January 2012, for instance, NTRO officials alerted the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to serious vulnerabilities in its cargo management system at Chennai, Coimbatore, Kolkata, Amritsar, Lucknow and Guwahati airports. Weak passwords and outdated operating systems were the main problems. These six airports handled 311,000 metric tonne of international cargo in 2010/11. A single day’s disruption would have sent 853 tonne of cargo to
the wrong destinations.
“The economic impact would have been immense had the systems been penetrated by unscrupulous elements,” says P.K. Kapoor, Executive Director (Information Technology), AAI. NTRO followed up its alert with a fullscale assessment of India’s air traffic control (ATC) system and advised, among other things, installing closecircuit TV cameras in ATC rooms.
India’s telecom network is equally vulnerable. Dhruv Soi, founder of information security firm Torrid Networks, recalls a recent assignment to test the networks of one of India’s largest telecom operators. He says his team got complete control of the company’s billing system within a week. It also found that the back-up server containing important data had weak passwords and was protected by flawed software. “We targeted this server and were able to control almost everything,” adds Soi.
Weak passwords also allowed hackers to breach the server and deface the website of the Pune-based Indian Railways Institute of Civil Engineering last August. “There are plenty of free tools available online that help hackers crack passwords easily,” says Vijay Devnath, General Manager (Infrastructure and Security), Centre for Railway Information Systems.
The damage was limited because the website is not frequently visited. It could have been worse. “Once a server is compromised, it gives easy access to other connected servers,” says Rajshekar Murthy, who runs the Gurgaon-based cyber security firm Orchidseven. Had the hackers breached the rail traffic management system, they could have sent trains crashing into one another.
If train accidents sound scary, imagine another Bhopal – or Chernobyl – like industrial disaster. State-run Nuclear Power Corporation of India is a constant target for hackers. “The company faces up to 10 targeted attacks a day but manages to block them all,” says Executive Director S.P. Dharne. If even one attack succeeds, the country could face a nuclear emergency.
Government agencies are not the only targets; even companies such as the Kolkata-based ITC have suffered cyber attacks. According to a July 2012 report by Bloomberg, Chinese hackers possibly had access to ITC’s network for a year. It also said cyber thieves hacked into the computer of ITC Chairman Y.C. Deveshwar’s personal assistant and stole several documents including tax filings. An ITC spokesman told Business Today that the company was “informed of a possible hacking attempt” of an independent computer. “The computer in question did not contain any critical information about the company nor did it have access to any such information,” he said. “Our IT security systems are constantly reviewed and updated to protect against such possible attacks.”
Some threats come from within India. In 2007, the IT team of a Chennai-based drug maker detected heavy traffic on servers connected to its research lab. The company was developing an anti-asthma molecule, and it suspected that a hacker was stealing the research data. Unable to trace the hacker, the company approached Mahindra Special Services Group (MSSG), a security consulting firm, part of the Mahindra & Mahindra group. MSSG experts placed a dummy file containing a virus on the company’s R&D folder that appeared to contain research data, says Dinesh Pillai, MSSG’s CEO.
“When the hacker returned, he went straight for the dummy file and we traced him using the virus,” he says. The hacker turned out to be a 29-year-old Chandigarh resident who was hired by a rival drug maker. Experts say India remains highly vulnerable to cyber attacks on its critical infrastructure. “I do not even know the command and control system for dealing with cyber attacks in the country,” says Pillai.
M.S. Vijayaraghavan, an adviser to NTRO, says all cyber security agencies are working in isolation. “If there is a synchronised attack on multiple critical infrastructure facilities, they are not in a position to join the dots and respond in a well-coordinated way,” he says. But, he adds, the formation of NCIIPC is changing that as the entire critical infrastructure has now come under its purview.
Indeed, NCIIPC is worried about thwarting the next big attack. Business Today asked NCIIPC officials to describe how India would face a Stuxnet-style attack on a nuclear power plant (see Repulsing Attacks). Stuxnet was a virus created in a joint US-Israeli operation against Iran that destroyed over 1,000 nuclear centrifuges, setting Tehran’s atomic programme back by at least two years.
“The cyber threat landscape has changed in the past five years. The threat of a Stuxnet-like attack on critical infrastructure will grow in the future,” says Unmesh Deshmukh, Director (Security Suites Sales), Asia Pacific and Japan, at IT security solutions provider Symantec. In coming years, private companies will matter greatly in India’s critical infrastructure as they control more and more assets in telecom, transport, energy, and banking and finance. In five years, NCIIPC hopes to have 500 cyber experts. But estimates by government and private agencies say the country needs 100 times that number.
Vijayaraghavan believes meeting such a target is possible. “That number may sound large, but remember, there is no college degree in hacking. There are thousands who do it as a hobby and we can connect with them.”
Sanjay Katkar, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of security software provider Quick Heal Technologies, says India needs more public-private interaction to secure its cyber space. “We require more collaboration between private companies and educational institutions to develop talent,” he says. “We need more cyber warriors and need to be ready for the cyber war.”
Cash transfer in PDS put on hold
January 31, 2013 at 7:46 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments Offhttp://www.deccanherald.com/content/307955/cash-transfer-pds-put-hold.html
Cash transfer in PDS put on hold
Ajith Athrady, New Delhi, Jan 26, 2013, DHNS:
Centre to wait till 90 pc of beneficiaries get bank a/cs
The Centre has decided to put on hold the proposal of introducing cash transfer in public distribution system (PDS) till 90 per cent of its beneficiaries in the country get bank accounts and Aadhaar numbers.
Though the Centre will conduct a pilot study in six Union Territories, including Delhi, on cash transfer in public distribution system, it will not be implemented in the country till 90 per cent of the PDS beneficiaries get bank accounts and Aadhaar numbers, Union Minister for Food and Consumer Affairs K V Thomas told Deccan Herald.
In the pilot project, likely to be rolled out from April, beneficiaries will receive the subsidy amount in their bank accounts and will buy rice and wheat from the fair price shops.
Though food subsidy has not been included in the national rollout for the Aadhaar-enabled direct benefit transfer in 20 districts across the country, the Centre was keen to
introduce this system in a phased manner.
Before introducing cash transfer, the government priority is modernisation of the PDS to plug the loopholes in the delivery system, he added.
Earlier, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Food and Consumer Affairs, headed by Congress Lok Sabha member Vilas Muttemwar, which vetted the National Food Security Bill, has recommended against introducing cash subsidy saying that it would be against the spirit of the scheme.
In its report submitted to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Muttemwar suggested that the government should first ensure that banking infrastructure and accessibility to banking are available across the country, including rural, hilly tribal areas and remote locations before introducing cash transfers against foodgrain.
Not fool-proof: Left
Left parties and activists also opposed the cash transfer saying there was no guarantee that it would be free from leakages and pilferage for individual beneficiaries.
With the parliamentary panel making several recommendations on the Food Security Bill, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has convened a high level meeting next week to discuss on how to incorporate them.
As the panel suggested to providing guaranteed foodgrain to 67 per cent of the population of the country which would burden the exchequer by Rs 1.20 lakh crore as against the current estimation of Rs 1.5 lakh crore per annum, the government wanted to deliberate on this issue in detail, sources said.
The standing committee had also suggested that the issue of price under the Food Security Bill should be reviewed once in five years and transport and handling should be borne by the beneficiaries, which was not in the original bill. The PMO meeting will discuss how to address these issues.
EPFO may put “in abeyance” decision to make Aadhaar mandatory
January 31, 2013 at 7:43 pm | Posted in Process | Comments OffA ‘Cost-Benefit’ Analysis of UID
January 31, 2013 at 7:42 pm | Posted in Critical Perspectives | Comments OffA ‘Cost-Benefit’ Analysis of UID
A cost-benefi t analysis by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy of the benefits from Aadhaar integration with seven schemes throws up huge benefi ts that are based almost entirely on unrealistic assumptions. Further, the report does not take into account alternative technologies that could achieve the same or similar savings, possibly at lower cost.
Reetika Khera (reetika.khera@gmail.com) is at the Institute of Economic Growth on a ThinkTank Initiative Associate Professor Fellowship.
I would like to thank Jean Drèze for helpful feedback.
A recent study released by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) presents an innovative “cost-benefit analysis” of the Unique Identification (UID) or Aadhaar project. This is, in principle, a welcome step towards more informed discussion and greater transparency of this project. On close examination, however, the widely-publicised conclusions of this study turn out to have a fragile basis.
In a nutshell, the NIPFP report covers the potential use of Aadhaar in seven major welfare schemes and subsidies. These are the public distribution system (PDS), Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA, or simply NREGA), school education (including teacher salaries, mid-day meals, textbooks and uniforms), fertiliser subsidy, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) subsidy, Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY), and payments in other schemes (pensions, Janani Suraksha Yojana, accredited social health activists and the Integrated Child Development Services). It estimates that linking these programmes to Aadhaar will lead to a “saving” of Rs 1 lakh crore over 10 years (Mathew 2012), and that after accounting for the costs of integration with Aadhaar the internal rate of return of the project will be over 50%.
Benefits from UID-Integration
The main question pertains to the benefits of integration with UID. The NIPFP report recognises that not all leakages in these programmes can be fixed by UID-integration. Only “bogus” beneficiaries, i e, ghosts (e g, a dead person whose name remains on government records) and duplicates (one person getting benefits twice), can be weeded out.1Estimates of bogus beneficiaries are available for only two of the seven programmes considered in the NIPFP report (the PDS and NREGA).
For the PDS, the report uses the leakage estimates from a report of the Planning Commission published in 2005, based on the outdated data pertaining to 1997-2001.2 That study estimated that 57% of PDS grain is diverted, of which, 17% was attributed to “ghost cards”. The definition of ghost cards includes (a) below the poverty line (BPL) cards that are not in possession of their owners, and (b) the excess of the total number of ration cards over that of total households (ibid: 82). It is worth-mentioning here that PDS entitlements are fixed per household. It is quite possible that in some cases several members of a joint household obtained separate ration cards for their respective nuclear families. Whether this should count as a case of “ghost” cards, as the Planning Commission report assumes, is not entirely clear. In any case, there is no reliable and up-to-date estimate of the share of bogus cards in circulation.
For NREGA the report assumes that UID integration will lead to savings of 12% of total expenditure – 7% from “automation of muster rolls” and another 5% from linking NREGA bank accounts to Aadhaar (without explaining how these would curb corruption, e g, how automation of muster rolls helps to reduce leakages). If the idea is that some people who do not work manage to have their names on the muster rolls and wages are credited to their accounts (i e, are “bogus” beneficiaries), then this fraudulent practice can continue even if muster rolls are automated.
The real protection from wage corruption in NREGA comes through bank accounts as it separates the payment agency from the implementing agency.3 With bank accounts, wage corruption can still continue in three forms: collusion (where the bank staff and NREGA functionaries collude to inflate work attendance and credit wages into accounts of people who have not worked), extortion (when an official forcibly takes money from NREGA workers after it has been withdrawn from the bank account) and deception (when a worker’s account is operated by NREGA functionaries without his or her knowledge). In the first two cases (collusion and extortion), linking accounts to UID will not help to reduce corruption. Only in cases of deception (or “identity fraud”) can biometric authentication at the stage of withdrawal of wages help.4 Estimates of the breakdown of the different types of corruption are not available.
The NIPFP report also recognises that estimates of duplicates and ghosts are not available for many schemes. What is the correct way to make assumptions on benefits of UID-integration in such cases? There is no easy answer to this, so what the NIPFP report does is either to apply the estimates of leakages due to bogus beneficiaries for one scheme to another (e g, in the case of fertiliser and LPG subsidies, the estimates applicable to the PDS are used),5 or – for the remaining schemes – to apply an arbitrary rate of 7-10%.6
Although these assumptions are termed “conservative” (Patnaik 2012), available evidence – patchy as it is – suggests otherwise. For example, an estimate of fraud in six pension schemes has been made by the Society of Social Audit Accountability and Transparency (Department of Rural Development, Government of Andhra Pradesh) for July-October 2012. Six types of corruption are documented: “dead persons”, “dual beneficiaries”, “partial payments”, “ineligible beneficiaries”, “not paid but drawn” and “other”. These social audit reports suggest that the total discrepancies in disbursement of pensions are around 2%. Discrepancies due to dead beneficiaries and dual pensions – problems that Aadhaar can fix – are a subset of this 2%. The rate assumed by the NIPFP report is 7%.
While the report admits that there are no “robust” estimates of duplicates and ghosts, it provides little justification for the rates assumed in the cost-benefit analysis. Anticipating questions about the assumptions, the anonymous authors of the NIPFP report do upload the spreadsheet with their calculations, inviting readers to “modify the assumptions and explore alternative outcomes”.7
Alternative Technologies
Biometric technology (of which Aadhaar is one variety) can help when there are bogus beneficiaries – ghosts or duplicates. Other, cheaper technologies (e g, computerisation) can also help weed out bogus cards and help plug other leakages. Tamil Nadu has a fully computerised PDS database and overall PDS leakages are very small (4% in 2009-10). In states such as Chhattisgarh, overall leakages in the PDS have fallen from 50% (in 2004-05) to 10% (in 2009-10) without any use of Aadhaar, but through computerisation and other measures (Khera 2011b). The question a cost-benefit analysis should really address is whether Aadhaar is more cost-effective than these and other alternatives, including local biometrics (used in Andhra Pradesh). This question is raised in passing, but not answered in the NIPFP report (Patnaik 2012).8
Concluding Comments
In short, NIPFP’s widely publicised cost-benefit analysis of UID is far from persuasive. It is almost entirely based on assumptions, not estimates, of the benefits of integration with Aadhaar. Where estimates (not assumptions) of bogus beneficiaries are used, they are unreliable or out of date. Further, the report does not take into account alternative technologies that could achieve the same or similar savings, possibly at lower cost.
The report also briefly considers the “costs” of integration of these schemes with Aadhaar. However, it makes no mention of the potential disruption that the integration exercise might cause. Disruption could be at the stage of integration (e g, old age pensioners may be unable to complete the required formalities) or during operations (e g, software, connectivity or biometric failures). By assuming, with touching optimism, that the UID system is reliable and seamless, the report fails to address crucial concerns that have been raised about this adventurous project.
Notes
1 For a detailed discussion on the types of corruption Aadhaar can weed out, see Khera (2011a).
2 “The reference period for the study was from 1997 to 2001 – the four-year period of the operation of TPDS. The household level information referred to the period from May to December 2001” (Planning Commission 2005: 13).
3 This practice has been in operation since 2008, except in Tamil Nadu. A few remote pockets were allowed to return to cash payments by Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh in late 2011.
4 Note also that once those who were using “deception” to defraud the system, may turn to extortion and collusion once identity fraud becomes impossible.
5 The report states, “Using the estimates for PDS and MGNREGS as benchmarks, we assume that using Aadhaar-enabled system would result in a benefit of 7% of the total value of subsidies” (p 11) and “in the absence of such robust studies estimating the leakage from the system towards commercial use, we assume that use of Aadhaar would result in a benefit of 10% of the total value of the subsidy (similar to PDS)” (p 12).
6 See, for instance, p 10 where the report says, “In the absence of data on the extent of leakages that exist on account of fake and duplicate beneficiaries, we have assumed this figure to be 10% of the total expenditure incurred by the government on books and uniforms for school children”.
7 Initial attempts (twice, at a three-day interval) to download the spreadsheet revealed that the spreadsheet was password protected. Now one out of seven worksheets can be modified. The practice of posting reports without author names is also observable with the documents on NREGA and PDS on the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI’s) website.
8 The cost-benefit work has been done by the MacroFinance group at NIPFP, a government-funded institution. The group has a project from UIDAI on financial inclusion which is perhaps why they focus only on UID. At the time of writing, no other paper on UID or financial inclusion was available on their website, raising the question whether the cost-benefit analysis itself was effectively sponsored by the UIDAI. Even if that is not the case, funding from the UIDAI to the MacroFinance group does create a possible conflict of interest, which would merit at least a short disclosure in the report.
References
Khera, Reetika (2011a): “The UID Project and Welfare Schemes”, Economic & Political Weekly, Volume 46, No 9, 26 February.
– (2011b): “Revival of the Public Distribution System: Evidence and Explanations”, Economic & Political Weekly, Volume 46, Nos 44-45, 5 November.
Mathew, Joe C (2012): “Big on Savings, Low on Leaks”, Business World, 24 November, available online athttp://www.businessworld.in/en/storypage/-/bw/big-on-savings-low-on-leak…
NIPFP (2012): “A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Aadhaar”, MacroFinance Group, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, 9 November, available online at http://macrofinance.nipfp.org.in/FILES/ uid_cba_paper.pdf
Patnaik, Ila (2012): “Identify This”, The Indian Express, 3 December, available online at http://www.indianexpress.com/news/identify-this/ 1039542/
Planning Commission (2005): “Performance Evaluation of Targeted Public Distribution System”, Programme Evaluation Organisation, Planning Commission, Government of India, March, available online athttp://planningcomission.nimc.in/reports/peoreport/peo/peo_tpds.pdf
Arun Sundararajan Interview ‘UID Is Like iPhone’
January 31, 2013 at 7:41 pm | Posted in Applications, Arguments For | Comments Off
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Arun Sundararajan Interview ’UID Is Like iPhone’
‘More people use it, more the applications that are created and downloaded… iPhone applications were developed because the iPhone became so popular.’
Only 30 per cent of Indian households boast of having at least one member with a ‘portable identity’ like a Passport or a Driving License. Such an identity, points out the economist from New York, is necessary for access to institutions and credit, which is why the biometric based Unique Identification (UID) project is going to be a game-changer. An alumnus of IIT, Madras,, from where he obtained a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering, Arun Sundararajan secured a degree in Management and a Ph.D. from Rochester. A Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences at Stern School of Business, New York University, he is an economist who researches how technology transforms business and society. He was on a short visit to India this month when he spoke to Outlook on the Unique Identity (UID) project. Any particular reason why you chose to study ‘Adhaar’ or the UID platform ? We were fascinated by the scope and ambition of the programme. We no longer find projects like this in the United States, for example. It has a ‘Moon-shot’ feel. UID is a digital infrastructure that seeks to connect people with economic institutions. People’s increasing access to institutions like banking, health services, insurance will have an impact, we believe, on the GDP of the country over the next decade. It will of course take longer for the full impact of the UID to be felt. You have had the Social Security Number in the US for a long time now. So, how is UID any different? For one thing, UID is far more advanced than anything we have seen anywhere so far. Secondly, unlike the Social Security Number or any other Identification project, UID is not tied to only identification or any one government service. It is designed as a platform to which applications can be integrated over a period of time. It is also by far the most advanced concept of identity in the world. But UID has given rise to serious misgivings in India, with many critics questioning the technology itself. How do you react to such misgivings ? There may be a feeling in India that UID is not going to work. And apprehensions to anything new are both valid and natural. But there is also a healthy respect for technology in India and there is belief in Information Technology (IT). And UID is an IT-based infrastructure. We are optimistic on several counts. In this case the government is not just putting up the infrastructure but also blueprints for how it will work. The government also had various options for enrolment. It could have been done wholly by government agencies or wholly by the industry. But UID chose a middle ground and combined the benefits of both. I am impressed with the quality of thinking that has gone into it. The PPP model, which required training 1,00,000 people first and then allow the private sector to hire them for the enrolment worked very well. What are the findings of the survey so far? We have studied the first batch of data from 2011. The data from 2012 will come in now. Two findings surprised us. One was that 70 per cent of the households which opted for UID enrolment had no portable identity at all till then. They may have had ration cards but they are not portable like Passports are. And not a single member of these 70 per cent households had any such identity. We were also curious to know whether the enrolment was drawing the ‘haves’ or the ‘have nots’. And the survey showed that more than half of the enrolment was among the weaker sections of the people, who were receiving some kind of identity proof for the first time. Half the country has no access to bank accounts and the UID has the potential to change that. How do you expect the UID to influence the lives of people? The well-being of the people cannot improve overnight just because they have a portable identity. Technology is not a magic bullet. But the UID platform is going to emerge over time as the most effective general purpose service platform. As more and more people get to use it, more and more applications will start getting attached to it. The blueprints already demonstrate how it can be used to access the banking system for transactions or how it can be used to open a bank account or get a mobile phone connection. It will be a long and slow process. There are privacy issues and worries over the government introducing an intrusive system to pry into people through UID. Do you endorse such concerns? Will UID applications be largely driven by the government or the private sector ? I collaborated with the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad on a UID-based Business Plan contest. There were 40 projects, some of them submitted by companies like Microsoft and Wipro. I remember a project which integrated the UID with a dispenser so that the required quantity of foodgrains is automatically released by a dispenser once the beneficiary is authenticated by the UID, without any human intervention. Remember, these are early days yet. I also believe that over a period of time, most government disbursals are likely to use the UID platform. And it is likely to reduce leakages. But for that to happen, the government agencies, their working style etc., will have to change. People need to be trained and so on. It is a time-taking process. Can you think of some of the future applications of UID? Is the government’s plan for ‘cash transfer’ or Direct Transfer of Benefits a knee-jerk reaction, a case of putting the cart before the horse ? I think it is an important step forward. For platforms to be successful, the eco-system has to be healthy. It is a chicken-and-egg situation. Unless people believe that UID will be beneficial, why would they enrol ? iPhone applications were developed because the iPhone became so popular. Mastercard and Visa are accepted because of the belief that they will deliver. Some commitment from the government, therefore, is important for the growth of the platform. Some times the cart has to be put before the horse or else there will neither be a horse nor a cart. How important is a legislation for use of data ? The United States has a set of elaborate guidelines for use of health data though the European Union countries have stronger legislations on the use of data. To their credit, the UIDAI has thought very carefully over both data ownership and data access. Therefore, India has the opportunity to deal with it afresh. The real privacy concerns are the use of data by the private sector and even in the United States, such guidelines are sorely lacking. With our increasing use of mobiles and computers, with the increase of electronic transactions, the private sector would be collecting a lot more data than the government. Even today, the governments are forced to approach Google and Facebook, which have more information about us than any government agency. A legislation is, therefore, necessary. |
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Meeting on cash transfers and UID in Alwar tomorrow and other events
January 31, 2013 at 7:40 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments Off[RTF Updates] Meeting on cash transfers and UID in Alwar tomorrow and other events
Cabinet meet on UID vs NPR again tomorrow Thursday 31st jan
January 31, 2013 at 7:39 pm | Posted in Process | Comments OffNew Delhi, January 30, 2013
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To overcome the Unique Identification Authority of India’s dependence on mobile networks in remote areas, the home ministry is pitching for deploying India’s multi-purpose Resident Identity Card for e-governance applications.
In a note listed for discussion by the cabinet on
thursday ministry pointed to the advantages that the microprocessor chip-based ID card has over UIDAI.
Besides security, e-governance applications in areas such as direct benefit transfer, public distribution system, rural employment guarantee scheme and passport can be easily built on the card platform, senior government officials told HT.
Unlike its alternative, these cards would provide an off-line mechanism to authenticate an individual’s identity, a government official said.
Encrypted card readers – about the size of credit card machines – would be able to read the data contained in the chip within seconds.
Many officials believe that excessive reliance on mobile networks is not advisable.
Another much-touted card that we have to chase and woo!
January 31, 2013 at 7:38 pm | Posted in Critical Perspectives | Comments OffThe great Indian card trick
Gouri Dange – Writes on everything in the city that makea us go grr..
Another much-touted card that we have to chase and woo!
Posted On Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 08:20:48 AM
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It’s not easy, remaining a card-carrying citizen of planet India. Let’s see now — how many cards have I, over the years, have to get for myself? Each time being told that this is THE card, and after you get a hold of this one, there is NO other card that you will have to furnish to prove that you are a bonafide citizen of this great land, and entitled to all the wonderful goodies that it has to offer. So there was long ago the ration card. Your parents carefully, oh so carefully, got theirs, held on to it, and when you grew up, you were handed a precious grubby note that said that your name had been cut from their card and you were now eligible to have your own ration card. Living in peace time, and in that very fortunate strata of society that never had to stand in line for substandard foodgrains and kerosene, that ration card served me only ever to prove I was me, and to get that other Holy Grail, the gas card. Then along came that other much-touted thing, the election card. And no, your passport, which you had acquired determinedly without the help of a tout, was not enough to establish your bona fides for your election card. You had to pull out that birth cert and school leaving cert and ‘light bill’ for where you lived, and go do that whole thing. That was circa 1992 —at that time, we were also asked to hand in our old ration cards, because the whole system was to be revamped and us haves were going to have a different coloured one, and the have-nots another coloured ones and the have-nothings would get a third colour. That is the last I ever saw of my haloed ration card, and thank god I was never ever asked for it again. As for the election card, that too was never required of me ever anywhere, and it sits patiently in my filing cabinet in a file importantly marked Important Documents. Somewhere along the way, I made a passport, and now, I was told, I had THE document of all documents in my hand, never ever needing anything else. Then came the PAN card. At last, we were told, this PAN card will be THE final card you will need for anything, ever. And it was so important that even if you lived without one, you could not die without one or your relatives would have to feed you to the maggots in a jungle or something and so people ran around like headless chicken for this PAN card — which of course again needed at least 3 documents to procure. Well, here I exaggerate — because mine came without much ado, on the basis of my passport. When the new kid-on-the-block, the aadhaar card, began to shimmer on the horizon, I decided to play ostrich. I just put my head in the sand and let all the commotion simply happen around me. Itold myself that this was really for the have-nots, and I would never really need to use one, as I was a have-everything, given that I could buy food in the market, cook it on a gas cylinder connection that I legitimately owned, had a PAN card, passport, election card (on which instead of d.o.b they had my age — which instantly made it a non-proof of age, by the way). Then I saw that people around me, other have-everythings, and not just the have-nots, were marching off and getting their aadhaar card done. So I reluctantly pulled my head out of the sand, and enviously heard stories of people’s residential societies or organisations simply calling the aadhaar card maker with his magic machine come to their doorstep. Since I live in a place that goes by the ‘every man for himself’ principle, I went to the office of a local nagar sevak who advertised on giant posters that we could apply for our card there. What I encountered there, on four different abortive trips, was that his pals and kith and kin had set up some kind of mini-power-centre there. People were being shouted at, herded, turned back, and hissed at. We were to take a token number, to come back another day. But that token number was available only between 10 and 11 in the morning and on many days the office shutter was firmly down, because it was the main-man’s kid’s birthday or something. Those who did manage to get fingerprinted, etc were told rudely — ok now your card can come to you in two months or two years — don’t bug us here asking for it. On my third trip there, some good tired Samaritan standing around suggested we go to a big housing complex near by, where it was being done. By this time, me, four army jawans who had missed their big day back at their base and were hence running pillar to post, and a bunch of people wanting help to fill the form (which had deliciously unintelligible acronyms like p.o.i, p.o.r, etc – and a couple of questions that needed yes-no answers, but were worded in that ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ cryptic way) had become quite a rag-tag team, wandering around in search of some logic and kindness. The big housing complex that we went to simply sneered at us, all puffed up by the presence of the aadhaar machine in their society, and firmly clanged the gates on us. Just when I was all set to do my ostrich act again, another giant poster came up in my area, and yet another nagar sevak was advertising that he was saving or sevaing us by providing the aadhaar card set up too. And wonder of wonders, we were treated politely, asked the right questions, our papers were checked, and we did not even have to make an appointment to come again another day. Never mind that the fingerprinting machines look like they were thrown away by some First World nation, and I almost had to make a handstand on one of them for my prints to appear clearly, but if all goes well, in three months I will be in possession of yet another hard-won card. |
`5,552-cr for ID card project
January 31, 2013 at 7:37 pm | Posted in Process | Comments Offhttp://www.asianage.com/india/5552-cr-id-card-project-838
`5,552-cr for ID card project
Jan 30, 2013 | Age Correspondent | New Delhi
The Union Cabinet is likely to consider the `5,552-crore project for resident identity cards on Thursday, which paves way for all Indian residents to be given a multi-purpose identity card.
The card will bear the UIDAI’s 12-digit Aadhaar or unique identification number and can be used for verifying identity as well as the delivery of various government programmes including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
Against the objections raised by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and department of electronics and information technology (DeitY) over verification and other issues, the Expenditure Finance Committee cleared `5552 crores for the project in 2012.
The RIC programme was first launched in nine coastal states after the Mumbai terror attacks. The home ministry wanted to extend the scheme to the rest of the country and had sought `6,790 crores to fund the programme. The home ministry has been projecting RIC as a national identity card but the scheme had run into trouble after UIDAI chairman Nilekani raised objections.
Direct subsidy transfer to farmers will benefit fertiliser firms
January 31, 2013 at 7:36 pm | Posted in Arguments For | Comments Offhttp://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/direct-subsidy-transfer-farmers-will-benefit-fertiliser-firms-400
Direct subsidy transfer to farmers will benefit fertiliser firms
By B Krishna Mohan Jan 29 2013 , Hyderabad
Tags: News
When direct cash transfer comes into play, the fertiliser players, who have their own retail outlets, will be better placed to handle higher inventories, according to S Sankarasubramanian, chief financial officer, Coromandel International, which is into fertilisers, speciality nutrients, crop protection and retail.
Direct cash transfer of subsidy to farmers will help the working capital cycle of fertiliser companies, he said. “But, there will be pressure on the dealer network to pay full costs for fertiliser stocks as the subsidy component will be paid directly to the farmers,” he told Financial Chronicle, while speaking on what cash transfer scheme will mean to fertiliser industry.
“This will lead to a kind of credit squeeze to that extent,” he said, adding that the credit requirement from dealers will be high for maintaining the inventory.
On the other hand, companies with their own retail chains can be efficient with the capital deployment as there will be no pending subsidy bills for the companies, he said.
With direct cash transfer, the onus of subsidy handling will shift away from the fertiliser companies calling for an efficient banking system to handle large number of farmers or farmer families, he pointed out, adding that identification of target farmers will be a challenge and the UID card will be a crucial tool in this.
“There will be a need for a post sale data across the industry for delivering the subsidy,” he said, adding that seasonal changes will affect the fertiliser demand even as the movement of prices in the international markets will be the key determinants for the quantum of subsidy.
For instance, the DAP prices are softening in the global market but the domestic urea prices are likely to see an increase. The present subsidy on the DAP is about Rs 14,350 per tonne.
According to an investor presentation last year, the subsidy component for Coromandel International had been Rs 1,626 crore in 2012, Rs 969 crore in 2011, Rs 508 crore in 2010 and Rs 947 crore in 2009. It revenues were Rs 9,823 crore, Rs 7,639 crore, Rs 6,452 crore and Rs 9,408 crore in 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009 respectively.
Direct transfers to slash subsidies by up to 60%: FM
January 31, 2013 at 7:35 pm | Posted in Arguments For | Comments OffDirect transfers to slash subsidies by up to 60%: FM
fe Bureau Posted online: Thursday, Jan 31, 2013 at 0000 hrs
New Delhi : Finance minister P Chidambaram has said he is hopeful of achieving 20-60% savings on subsidies a year through better distribution under the new direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme that he expects to roll out completely by end-2013. The minister also said the Budget in February would be a “responsible” one, and not one mindful of next year’s election, according to a Standard Chartered Bank note that highlighted key takeaways from his interaction at an investors conference in London on Tuesday.
With the promise that the subsidy on diesel, which accounts for 60% of the total fuel subsidy bill, will be phased out in two years, the targeted savings on account of DBT in other subsidies would indeed come handy for the Centre in its difficult-looking fiscal consolidation plan.
From the start of this month, the Aadhaar-enabled DBT has been under implementation in 20 districts of the country for disbursal of various doles/entitlements like old-age and widow pension schemes, student scholarships and payments under the employment guarantee scheme.
Subsidies including the three explicit ones on food, fertiliser and fuel will also be distributed to the beneficiaries through this route in coming months. Subsidies this fiscal are budgeted to be R1.9 lakh crore or 12.75% of the Budget, whereas the claims, inclusive of carryovers from last year, would be much higher, Chidambaram said.
“Building on the expected 5.3% fiscal deficit for FY13, a 4.8% deficit target is possible in FY14 if the government commits to diesel price deregulation, higher revenues via better tax administration, fertiliser subsidy reduction by way of urea price deregulation and lower administrative costs related to certain expenditure,” the note said.
Chidambaram said there was no ground for a rating downgrade for the Indian economy, and that GDP growth will return to 8% level in 2014-15. He expressed confidence that the pending Bills on the pension and insurance sectors would be passed in the budget session of Parliament in February.
The note quoted Chidambaram promising implementation of the goods and services tax (GST) by the end of 2013 and the Direct Taxes Code by August 2013. While reduction of fiscal deficit is an overriding objective for the government, attracting domestic and foreign investment was another priority for the government.
Reviving the investment cycle was key to a gradual recovery in growth to 6-7% in 2013-14 and to 8% in 2014-15.
The finance minister said the GST implementation alone could potentially add 1.5 percentage points to GDP growth, as per the note. Chidambaram said the government was seriously considering suggestions of the Rangarajan committee to review gas prices after 2014. But he hinted that the short-term capital gains tax (STCG) on listed securities is unlikely to be removed, as the government was unable to narrow the tax base. A panel led by Parthasarathi Shome, which reviewed the General Anti-Avoidance Rules, recommended abolition of STCG on listed securities.
The minister, said the note, believed India’s potential growth is 8% and above, and that the country cannot afford to have less than 7% growth.
On issuing sovereign bonds abroad, Chidambaram said the finance ministry is considering different options and has not yet chosen any particular route. He stressed on pursuing fiscal consolidation, with the fiscal deficit being reduced to 4.8% of GDP in 2013-14.
“I have drawn the red lines. The red lines are that the fiscal deficit for the current year will be no more than 5.3% (of the GDP) and the fiscal deficit for the next year will be no more than 4.8%. That’s a red line and I will not breach that red line,” he said in an interview to Financial Times.
Asked whether the government would be strong enough to cut fuel subsidies, he said he would not make any “declarations from the pulpit”. The government has already corrected diesel prices and allowed oil companies to make small corrections periodically over a period of time.
Maintaining that the government has to still correct about Rs 10 a litre on diesel, Chidambaram said a beginning has been made this month and the government should be judged by the steps it took.
Asked whether the government would like to abandon fuel subsidies as a long-term goal, he said not all subsidies can be abandoned. Citing the example of kerosene, Chidambaram said if the subsidy on it is removed completely, it would make the fuel unaffordable to the rural poor and they would demand wood for cooking purpose that could lead to destruction of forest.
Direct benefits transfer: How the ‘game’ has changed
January 31, 2013 at 7:33 pm | Posted in Arguments For | Comments Offhttp://www.business-standard.com/india/news/direct-benefits-transfer-howgame-has-changed/500548/
Direct benefits transfer: How the ‘game’ has changed
Business Standard / Jan 31, 2013, 00:40 IST
It’s been called a game-changer, a nationwide technology-backed initiative that promises to change the way the government delivers entitlement to citizens. But a month after the Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme was officially rolled out across 20 districts, a look at the ground realities reveals a yawning gap between intent and implementation. Of the five districts Business Standard visited, there are those, like Northeast Delhi, where not a single transfer has been made. Nonetheless, the challenge of simultaneously enrolling and opening bank accounts of millions of beneficiaries must be quickly surmounted, before the efficacy of the ambitious DBT scheme can be adjudged.
ALWAR, RAJASTHAN: Innovation drives enrolment
Ashutosh A T Pednekar, the collector of Alwar, sits in a magnificent office in the city’s erstwhile palace, the same chamber from where Michael Francis O’Dwyer, the British administrator notorious for endorsing the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, once governed Rajasthan’s northern regions. Quite unlike his Irish predecessor’s legacy, this Goan civil servant is likely to be better known for an administrative innovation that may well turn out to be the blueprint for implementing the DBT schemelaunched on January 1.
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MYSORE, KARNATAKA: A head start, but still a long way to go
In a little more than two weeks, after the government announced its intention to rollout the DBT scheme in Alwar last December, Pednekar managed to achieve 100 per cent Aadhaar penetration among the 84,000 beneficiaries of 14 government schemes in his district. “On December 15, about 22 per cent of the 84,000 beneficiaries in Alwar had Aadhaar cards,” says Pednekar. “So, to get to 100 per cent penetration, we broke the entire enrolment programme down to the panchayat level and planned the entire operation accordingly.”
Each of Alwar’s 472 panchayats has between 150 and 300 beneficiaries, who are entitled to benefits under four broad schemes: Elementary education, secondary education, social justice, and medical and health-related benefits.
Pednekar got a detailed list of beneficiaries drawn up in each panchayat under these schemes and instructed panchayat officials to ensure that those in their areas were enrolled. For beneficiaries under the elementary education benefit scheme, for instance, the school principal was made responsible for enrolments.
That apart, some 44 machines were pressed into service for enrolments during this period, with each machine averaging about 72 enrolments per day. “We created clusters, where four or five panchayats could be serviced by four to six machines, and the time-table was handled at the SDO (sub-divisional officer) level. At any college that had more than 100 students, we took a machine for enrolment. During this period, we completely stopped any general population enrolment. Otherwise, we would have been washed away.”
The focused enrolment of beneficiaries meant that the larger challenge of Aadhaar penetration was dealt with within weeks, but Pednekar was still left to contend with some 30,000 beneficiaries without bank accounts.
Instead of going through the lengthy know-your-customer (KYC) forms, Pednekar says he asked banks to provide the district administration with bank account numbers. “We mandated that the KYC forms would follow within a week. This helped us to seed the bank account numbers with the Aadhaar numbers quickly. But if the KYC form wasn’t completed, the account wouldn’t become operational.” Pednekar also ensured manual checking of the beneficiary bank accounts.
Since January 1, as a result, the district has transferred Rs 5.05 crore to 20,400 beneficiaries.
Suresh Chand Sharma, headmaster of the state-run Gandhi National School in Alwar’s old city, says a couple of his students were even invited to withdraw money via fingerprint authentication some weeks ago. “At the end of the month, we will ask for their bank passbooks and then we’ll know exactly what has happened.”
Nonetheless, the advantages of the DBT system are clear. For scholarships, the previous process involved the money travelling through six administrative layers. Now, it’s been reduced to a two-step process.
DEVJYOT GHOSHAL
Now UIDAI can help prevent TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN and help provide ADEQUATE SAFETY MEASURES AND AMENITIES IN RESPECT OF WOMEN
January 25, 2013 at 8:47 pm | Posted in Applications | Comments Off-Justice-Verma-Committee-Report recommends:
Under-CHAPTER SIX,TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN, point 46, page-186
“Schools must be encouraged to issue Identity cards to children.”
Under-CHAPTER TEN PROVISION OF ADEQUATE SAFETY MEASURES AND AMENITIES IN RESPECT OF WOMEN, point 11, page-266
“Every holder of a permit issued by any of the road transport authorities in the NCR and NCT, Delhi will within ten days from today, file with its RTA a list of drivers who are engaged by him together with suitable photographs and other particulars to establish the identity of such persons”
In relation to metropolitan towns, it is necessary that public transport vehicles must have drivers who are security vetted and who have an identity card of certification by the police after which alone they will be permitted to drive such vehicles;
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I wonder what are the presumptions underlying these recommendation
Do the committee members believe, identity of a child is stable and therefore giving an identity card can solve the problem of disappearance? How should one interpret a vague statement like Schools must be encouraged to issue Identity cards to children? Exactly what kind of encouragement the committee members suggest? Are they suggesting a financial encouragement or a punitive encouragement? Or are they suggesting a policy led encouragement, perhaps asking Mr. Nilekani to link up all the schools with UIDAI?
and why only in metropolitan towns it is necessary that public transport vehicles must have drivers who are security vetted? What do they mean by security vetting? What does the committee members wants the police to exactly know about a prospective driver of a public transport? Who will vet this information? Against which precise law?
Aadhar = mechanism to recognize the unique journey of aspiration
January 20, 2013 at 6:31 pm | Posted in Arguments For, Projections, UID Propaganda | Comments OffAICC Chintan Shivir
Birla auditorium
Jaipur 18-20 January 2013
20 JANUARY 2013
Rahul Gandhi
Excerpt from Rahul Gandhi’s speech
The time has come to question the centralized, unresponsive and unaccountable systems of decision-making in governance, administration and politics. The answer is not that people say we need to run the system better. The answer is not in running these systems better. The answer is to completely transforming these systems. Yet, I am optimistic.I am optimistic because we have already put the building blocks of this revolution inplace. And to a big degree I would like to thank the Congress President, the PrimeMinister and the Congress Party for putting these building blocks in place. Let me tell you what these building blocks are. First of all, India is more connected today than ithas ever been. We have the networks of roads, information, communication, peopleand media for new ideas to emerge, develop and take flight. It is no longer possibleto limit an idea whose time has come.
Aadhar gives us an unprecedented mechanism to recognize the unique journey of aspiration of every single Indian no matter where he is. Direct cash transfer is going to allow us to respond to these dreams with anempowering delivering system. My father used to speak about 15 paisa to the rupeereaching the people and we today are preparing the system that is going to answerthat question. We are going to answer that question. And 99% of our people’s money can go to them. It is a revolution that no other country has done. And we are preparing that revolution. We prepare the revolution and our opponents say that we are bribing the country. Giving the people their due is now called bribing the country. They say it because they are scared. They understand what Aadhar can do. They understand what cash transfers can do. And most important, they understand what people in the Congress Party, what the thinking in the Congress Party can do.
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Jaipur, Jan 19 — With over 1,600 rooms booked in over 40 hotels, the Congress’ three-day ‘Chintan Shivir’ has boosted the city’s hospitality sector, which was witnessing a dull tourist season.
The rooms in 43 hotels are occupied by around 350 Congress delegates and over 250 mediapersons from all over India. In addition, over 1,200 All India Congress Committee (AICC) members will be arriving in the city Sunday.
The ‘Chintan Shivir’, the Congress’ introspective meet, is being held here Jan 18-20.
“Half a dozen hotels were booked for four days for the media and delegates beginning Thursday. The rest have been booked for Jan 19 and 20 (Saturday and Sunday) for AICC members,” Harish Kumar, executive manager of the Four Point Sheraton, one of the host hotels, told IANS.
Kumar said the event has come as a welcome surprise in a dull season.
“The tourism industry has still not recovered completely from the global recession. Foreign tourists are still shying away from international holidays. This event was much needed,” he said.
Sunil Kumar, hotel Royal Orchid, told IANS: “People in the hospitality business are delighted. There weren’t many tourists this season and this event has saved us from losses.”
A standard room for one night in all the 43 hotels ranges between Rs.4,000 to Rs.6,000.
According to a Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation official, the room occupancy prior to the event was between 40 to 50 percent. However, it surged to around 90 percent over the weekend.
The officials further said that the exposure the city is getting due to the event will further generate revenue as some Congress delegates would like to return with friends or families.
“Many people have come here for the first time and there is a possibility that they will return,” said Harish Kumar.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is staying at the governor’s house Raj Bhawan, while Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and general secretary Rahul Gandhi are lodged at a private hotel, Raj Mahal Palace.
(Rahul Vaishnavi can be contacted at rahul.v@ians.in)
http://post.jagran.com/chintan-shivir-to-be-held-with-simplicity-claims-gehlot-1358396406
Chintan Shivir to be held with simplicity, claims Gehlot
Posted on: 17 Jan 2013, 09:50 AM
Jaipur: Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Wednesday claimed that the Congress’ Chintan Shivir (brainstorming camp) would take place with “simplicity” and the expenses would be borne by All India Congress Committee (AICC).
“This is purely a party level event so it was decided that the expenses for hotel, vehicle etc will be borne by the AICC. There will be no burden on the government,” Gehlot told reporters here.
The chief minister said that the preparations for the major event are going on in full swing.
“Congress President, Prime Minister, Rahul Gandhi will stay here for three days. Chief ministers of several party-ruled states, leaders of Congress legislative parties,
AICC members will be among around 1,600 people who are coming to attend the event,” he said on the sidelines of a function here.
The chief minister also reviewed the arrangements for the event and gave necessary directions to officials as the meteorological department has predicted rains or thunderstorm during the next 2-3 days.
Meanwhile, state chief secretary C K Mathew also took stock of the arrangements, including the security measures to be adopted, for the Chintan Shivir.
The Chintan Shivir will take place on January 18 and 19, which will be followed by AICC meeting on January 20 at Birla auditorium.
Gangs faking Aadhaar, credit cards busted
January 10, 2013 at 2:04 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffGangs faking Aadhaar, credit cards busted
TNN Jan 8, 2013, 04.18AM IST
BANGALORE: Three men who manufactured fake identity cards and bank documents have been arrested. The trio allegedly created fake Aadhaar, PAN and voter ID cards, besides demand drafts and cheques at their home.
“The fraud was exposed when they sought to encash a cheque purportedly issued by a family court in Mysore,” said DCP (Central) BR Ravikanthe Gowda.
The arrested were identified as Harish Kumar A alias Harshavardhana, 26, of Sharadadevi Nagar in Mysore, G Shanmugam, 35, of Kodlu Village, Singasandra, off Hosur Road, and Rajashekharan alias Raje Gowda, 53, of KP Agrahara, off Magadi Road.
“The trio faked demand drafts and cheques of ING Vysya Bank, State Bank of Mysore and Bank of Baroda and encashed them. When we raided the premises of Rajashekharan, we found printers, computers and CPUs that were used in making the fake proofs and seals,” said the DCP.
They purchased cars with fake credit cards
Jayanagar police arrested 14 persons and seized 27 fake credit cards which they swiped at malls, electronic shops and other business establishments to make huge purchases. The cards were in the name of two major private Indian banks and a few multinational ones.
“Using these credit cards, the accused purchased a Toyota Innova car, a Mahindra Scorpio, 11 two-wheelers, high-end watches, electronic gadgets like mobile phones and gold jewellery. We are yet to estimate the total worth of goods they have purchased. The kingpin of the racket, Jayakumar, is among the arrested. He had joined hands with another agent Gunashekharan, who brought the fake cards from Malaysia. Gunashekharan is absconding,” said DCP (South) HS Revanna.
He was earlier arrested by Sampigehalli police and was out on bail. He also used to sell fake credit cards for a price.
UIDAI cancels 3.84 lakh fake Aadhaar numbers
January 10, 2013 at 2:01 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffNew Delhi, December 25, 2012
Last Updated: 02:26 IST(26/12/2012)
Last Updated: 02:26 IST(26/12/2012)
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Some have managed to beat the so-called unbeatable Unique Identification (UID) system and got fake Aadhaar numbers generated raising security concerns over UPA’s new UID based governance model.
Nandan Nilekani led Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has
cancelled 3.84 lakh Aadhaar numbers of the total 4.10 lakh generated under the biometric exception clause.
The Aadhaar agencies are allowed to enroll people without proper finger-prints or iris under the biometric exception clause.
In this, the agencies are required to provide photographs of the non-existent biometrics along with demographic details of the enrollers.
The biometric exception was incorporated to make Aadhaar truly inclusive identification generation process as there was highly level of exclusion in other systems such as ration cards.
But, the agencies exploited the clause to make some pass money as for each successful enrollment and generation of Aadhaar number, the agency got Rs. 50.
It was business as usual for UIDAI till a large number of Aadhaar letters in Andhra Pradesh remained undelivered.
“Most of the 45,000 undelivered Aadhaar letters in Andhra were under the exception clause. It hinted that something was wrong,” a senior UIDAI official said. Further scrutiny revealed that of 48.80 lakh Aadhaar generated in Andhra, 2.30 lakh were false and were subsequently cancelled.
With the lid blown off, similar instance cropped in other states.
A Delhi government official said, who reported around 13,000 fraudulent enrollments to UIDAI, said the biometric exception was introduced for people with high level of disabilities but it was frequently used raising a question over credibility of Aadhaar numbers.
The UIDAI admitted of similar high number of fake Aadhaar numbers from Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh in a reply to Lok Sabha.
The authority also found of the total Aadhaar generated under this clause, only 22,195 were found to be genuine. Another 6,600 Aadhaar numbers are under investigation.
For enrollment of around 90 crore residents in subsequent phases, the UIDAI has asked agencies not to opt for biometric exception without approval from a senior, preferably a government official.
The UPA government has decided to use Aadhaar payment platform for delivery of its welfare schemes once the enrollment is complete likely by April 2014.
Teething trouble for Aadhaar registration
January 10, 2013 at 1:58 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffTeething trouble for Aadhaar registration
DC |
Vijayawada: Residents of Vijayawada city are facing problem due to insufficient Aadhaar registration centres. Several people complained of errors in Aadhaar cards and majority of the people are yet to receive the cards.
As the officials are insisting on Aadhaar cards for sanctioning pensions and scholarships, a large number of people started visiting the registration centres in the city. Though the people submit application for registration of the cards, the agencies entrusted with the work are asking them to appear before it for taking family photograph. But several applicants complained of delay in taking photographs by the agencies.
The district administration has entrusted the work of Aadhaar cards registration to two agencies in the city.
Meanwhile, the demand for the cards also increased with the announcement of the state government on cash transfer scheme through Aadhaar cards.
Speaking to this newspaper, joint collector Ms P. Usha Kumari said that the number Aadhaar cards registration centres would be increased in the district. She said at present 11 centres are functioning. She said the agencies have to register the particulars of 10 lakh people.
Punjab trips on Aadhar, misses direct cash transfer deadline
January 10, 2013 at 1:56 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffPunjab trips on Aadhar, misses direct cash transfer deadline
Priya Yadav, TNN Jan 2, 2013, 04.43AM IST
CHANDIGARH: Lagging behind in making Aadhar cards preparing Punjab missed the direct-cash-transfer bus on the date of its launch, even as neighbouring Haryana started the scheme enabling over 300 people in Ambala to ring in the New Year with their pensions making way directly into their bank accounts.
Punjab could not meet the deadline set by the Union government for launch of the country’s most ambitious project of transferring money directly in the beneficiaries’ accounts. “We did not get the letter from the Punjab government to begin direct cash transfers,” said Keshni Anand Arora, Haryana IAS officer, who is heading the project in the three northern states of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana.
Under the scheme, money meant for recipients of 29 welfare programmes — mainly related to scholarships and pensions — would be transferred to bank accounts linked to their unique identification numbers.
Out of the three districts in Punjab where the scheme was scheduled to be launched, Nawanshahr has managed to get 95% of Aadhar cards made while in Gurdaspur only 60% of the population has been covered. Fatehgarh Sahib has seen 80% of cards made.
“Punjab has re-fixed its targets and the scheme will now be launched after all cards are made by January 10,” said Arora.
In Haryana, Ambala district, which has 6,000 beneficiaries, started social security scheme of giving pensions in Durana village. “Sonepat will follow suit as the district is ready for a take off,” said Arora. UT Chandigarh saw the scheme take off smoothly as eight schemes, primarily related to scholarships, education and pension, started with more than 1,400 people getting cash directly into their accounts.
Keen to catch up, Punjab government has gone into an overdrive to get the Aadhar cards made to meet the revised deadline. “We have put lot of machines in Gurdaspur and our employees are working overtime to get the needful done,” said an official of the state government.
Aadhaar card to be accepted as proof to get passport: Ministry of external Affairs
January 10, 2013 at 1:55 pm | Posted in Applications | Comments OffAadhaar card to be accepted as proof to get passport: Ministry of external Affairs
Suggested Readings: January 2013 Current Affairs, National | India, 2013 Current Affairs
Published on: 09-JAN-2013
The Ministry of External Affairs on 8 January 2013 decided and consequently advised all Passport Issuing Authorities to accept Aadhaar letter as Proof of Address and Photo identity in conjunction with any other prescribed documents for proof of address/identity for the purpose of passport application.
Presently, it is being seen that the authorities accept passport applications based on about 14 documents such as voter ID card or electoral photo identity card (EPIC), ration card, PAN, driving license, birth certificates among others.
Aadhaar is a 12 digit individual identification number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India on behalf of the government. This number will serve as a proof of identity and address, anywhere in India.
Any individual, irrespective of age and gender, who is a resident in India and satisfies the verification process laid down by the UIDAI, can enroll for Aadhaar.
Aadhaar must for 11 government schemes
January 10, 2013 at 1:53 pm | Posted in Applications | Comments OffAadhaar must for 11 government schemes
Chittaranjan Tembhekar, TNN Jan 8, 2013, 09.59PM IST
MUMBAI: Beneficiaries of around 11 government schemes aimed at offering financial aid – such as scholarships for students and aid for women and disabled – will be enrolled on priority under Aadhaar.
The drive has been initiated in state’s five districts namely Mumbai, Pune, Amravati, Nandurbar and Wardha, said Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Deputy Director General, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
With the roll out of Direct Cash Transfer (DCT) for several government schemes, a special drive has been started for the beneficiaries of schemes such as — Post Matric Scholarship for SC Students, Pre Matric Scholarship for SC Students, Pre Matric Scholarship for Children of those Engaged in Unclean Operations, Post Matric Scholarship for OBCs, Post Matric Scholarship for Students with Disabilities, National Means cum Merit Scholarship, National Incentive for the Girl Child for Secondary Education, Post Matric Scholarship Scheme, Janani Suraksha Yoajana, Permanent Disability Benefits, Dependent Benefits, and Sickness State Insurance Corporation schemes.
“The beneficiaries in these districts should get themselves enrolled at the earliest as the cash being offered in these schemes is going to be linked to their Aadhaar numbership and thus will be transferred in their accounts,” UIDAI officials said. “Beneficiaries of these schemes thus have to come up with proper documents showing that they are the beneficiaries of those schemes,” they added.
Aadhaar cards dumped in Bhopal’s city drain
January 10, 2013 at 1:51 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments Offhttp://www.ciol.com/ciol/news/155473/aadhaar-cards-dumped-bhopals-city-drain
Aadhaar cards dumped in Bhopal’s city drain
The news comes when people are complaining that they have not received their Aadhaar cards even after fulfilling all the formalities
News | by CIOL Bureau
BHOPAL,
INDIA: Bundles of Aadhaar cards were found in a drain in police station road in Bhopal which is one of the busiest places of the city.
People have been complaining that they have not received their Aadhaar cards even after fulfilling all the formalities.
On the other hand, district officials claim that they have distributed atleast 90 percent of these cards and have also covered individual houses to get information required for Aadhaar cards.
Pvt agency to speed up UID enrolment work
January 10, 2013 at 1:48 pm | Posted in Process | Comments Off Pvt agency to speed up UID enrolment work
TNN | Jan 9, 2013, 03.03 AM IST
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PUNE: The district collector Vikas Deshmukh has initiated steps to speed up enrolment for the unique identification number (Aadhar) in Pune city and rural parts. The collector on Tuesday said that the administration was planning to complete the enrolment in a phased manner. Top priority would be given to enrol those citizens identified under 34 schemes selected for the direct cash transfer, he said.
The collector elaborated that the beneficiaries of various schemes will continue to receive subsidies or scholarships in their bank accounts even if they were still to receive UID numbers. He said that the administration was in the process to link the UID number with the bank accounts and that disbursement of subsidies or scholarships have not been stopped.
Deshmukh said that the administration has shortlisted one agency which plans to procure about 100 machines and trained staff to undertake enrolment work of about 76,000 beneficiaries identified under 34 schemes, which will be followed by enrolment of school students and others.
He said, “According to recent guidelines issued by the government, the collector is now empowered to appoint an agency at the local level for Aadhar enrolment. We are looking for more agencies to take up the work.”
According to the administration, as many as 67 UID machines have been installed in Pune city, 85 in Pimpri-Chinchwad and 67 in rural parts. Deshmukh said that citizens need not panic as the administration was initiating steps to increase enrolment.
The collector also said that those citizens who have enrolled for UID, but have still not received the number can approach SETU centres for the same.
India risks backlash hurrying through overdue welfare reform
January 9, 2013 at 7:43 am | Posted in Problems | Comments Offhttp://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFBRE89O0DD20121025
India risks backlash hurrying through overdue welfare reform
Thu Oct 25, 2012 8:15am GMT
By Manoj Kumar
BEELAHERI, India (Reuters) – India is shaking up the way it gets billions of welfare dollars to the poor with a plan that could one day reshape the economy and tackle graft keeping millions in poverty, but in one small town a pilot of the new system is proving unpopular.
Putting India’s technological prowess to work to bring the entire 1.2 billion population within the reach of government, the widely feted unique identity (UID) project set up by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani two years ago has so far scanned the irises of 210 million people into a biometric database.
Now, in a more ambitious version of programmes that have slashed poverty in Brazil and Mexico, the government has begun to use the UID database, known as Aadhaar, to make direct cash transfers to the poor, in an attempt to cut out frauds who siphon billions of dollars from welfare schemes.
“We can ensure that the money goes to the correct person and the role of middleman is ended with direct transfer of benefits to the needy,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a crowd of thousands in the Rajasthani town of Dudu on October 20, as he launched the programme, accompanied by the president of his Congress party, Sonia Gandhi.
Following a slew of reforms aimed at jolting Asia’s third largest economy from a deep slump, the plan could over medium term bring some order to India’s troublesome fiscal deficit by plugging leakages of subsidized grain, fuel and fertilizer.
Two years ago, a McKinsey report estimated such an electronic platform for government payments to households would save up to $18 billion annually – enough to wipe out one-sixth of a fiscal deficit that could hit 6 percent of GDP this fiscal year.
In the next year alone, the government plans to transfer the wages for over 50 million workers in a rural job scheme, along with pensions for 20 million senior citizens and about 5 million education scholarships and some fuel subsidies directly to bank accounts linked with the Aadhaar identity number.
But in Beelaheri, a small village in the Rajasthani region of Kotkasim where the kerosene pilot began last year, hundreds of bank accounts have been set up without referencing the UID database, as the government pushes ahead with the politically rewarding cash transfers before readying Aadhar to identify the correct beneficiaries.
Critics warn good intentions are already being undermined by the hurry ahead of a national election due in 2014 and by vested interests, including bureaucrats and politicians in states, who stand to lose discretion over distributing funds.
The government is aiming for about two trillion rupees ($37.22 billion) of cash transfers under different schemes by March 2014 even if the distribution of the ID numbers is incomplete, according to several media reports.
By lowering costs, Aadhaar could make a planned food subsidy programme that is a pet project of the left-leaning Sonia Gandhi easier to finance, for example.
The Congress party is banking on that programe to help it win a third consecutive term, despite voter anger at graft.
REALITY CHECK
The pilot project in Beelaheri, a village of 2,000 people some 130 km (81 miles) southwest of Delhi, replaces kerosene subsidies with cash rebates and has been running since December. It has massively lowered demand for the subsidized fuel, which weighs on government finances.
But teething problems are immediately visible.
Hundreds of new Aadhaar ID cards are strewn in messy piles on the counter of a small tea-shop on the edge of the village. Locals drift in and rifle through the cards, looking for their own.
The government has begun the cash transfers even to people who have not received their cards, said Pushkar Raj Sharma, a local government official overseeing the scheme in the area.
On the back foot over multiple corruption allegations, the government is desperate to win back voters with effective welfare programs without further blowing out a fiscal deficit being closely watched by global credit ratings agencies.
The government is likely to spend over $55 billion this fiscal year ending in March on fuel, fertiliser and food subsidies, as well as a flagship scheme guaranteeing 100 days of work a year to rural labourers, and other welfare programmes.
Launched by Singh in 51 districts, the government says the direct cash transfer plan will eliminate millions of fraudulent benefit claimants over the next 4-5 years. It says Aadhaar could reduce subsidies by about one percentage point of GDP.
The Kotkasim plan, one of five small pilot projects across India, offers insight into issues the wider Aadhaar-direct transfer project may face when it is rolled out nationally.
Sharma said the project had cut the amount of kerosene being sold to one-eighth of the earlier levels, partially due to elimination of “ghost beneficiaries,” or duplicate identities used to claim benefits.
But he also admitted the pilot had been rolled out with little coordination with the UID database and that funds being transferred arrived only sporadically in bank accounts.
“Funds are not coming in time. Otherwise the scheme is very useful to check leakages,” Sharma said.
Many villagers were frustrated at the new system, which makes them pay market rates up to three times the subsidized cost of kerosene, and then makes it difficult to recover the money.
Tailor Dharam Pal said he had simply stopped buying kerosene he was entitled to because he faced a lengthy visit to the bank to withdraw the rebate, often to find it had not been deposited.
“I have no idea when the money will come and I have to spend half of my working day every time to visit the bank,” said Pal.
Instead, many villagers are buying more easily available cooking gas, suggesting lower kerosene sales in part represent a drop in legitimate use.
Lower sales are good for government finances whatever the reason – but obstacles to cheap fuel do not play well with voters.
“The government will have to pay a price in elections. Not even half of the people in village are buying kerosene.” said Tulsi Ram, 45, a villager.
Critics warn the goal of registering the biometric data of 1.2 billion people — currently being carried out by two different enrollment programmes — and bringing the masses of rural India into the banking system could face big problems if the wrinkles are not quickly ironed out.
“I would call it a logistical nightmare,” said Jyotinder Kaur, an economist at HDFC Bank, India’s No. 3 lender.
Kaur feared the system would be still vulnerable to graft, whereby one person could obtain multiple cards during their distribution, for example.
“I would be very cautious given the implementation risks, and the size of the population and the fact that there is really no sanctity attached to the UID,” Kaur said.
(Additional reporting by Arup Roychoudhury; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Simon Cameron-Moore)
Lobbying – the unregulated catalyst that cannot be ignored
January 9, 2013 at 7:42 am | Posted in Critical Perspectives | Comments Offhttp://barandbench.com/brief/3/2885/lobbying-the-unregulated-catalyst-that-cannot-be-ignored
Lobbying – the unregulated catalyst that cannot be ignored
Saumya Ramakrishnan
Oct 25, 2012
Advocacy has existed since the time human beings have been in existence. It is a manifestation of freedom of expression. Hence, it is not uncommon to see a relative or a close friend go to great lengths to help someone secure lucrative jobs or plum assignments. However, if the people involved in securing the deal are people you have elected to the Parliament to serve you and the person being favoured is a close associate of the MP and the assignment concerned is of significance to the public, then eyebrows are raised.
Hence it came as no surprise when a letter written by BJP President Nitin Gadkari, seeking the release of funds to pay contractors for the Gosikhurd dam project, created rattles in the political circle. The project itself is under the scanner of the Central Water Commission for being wrought with construction flaws. Moreover, in the letter, the BJP President made a personal assurance that any rectification due to bad quality of work shall be at the risk and cost of the contractor. The fact that the main contractor is a BJP Rajya Sabha member and is known for his proximity to the BJP President makes this incident even more dubious.
It’s not just politics which is witnessing the presence of people trying to influence decisions with the backing of somebody in power. Even India’s much loved sport, cricket, has not been spared. Reports in newspapersearlier this month suggested that three players from the Indian cricket team had called up senior BCCI officials to lobby for a former national cricketer to be chosen as the selector from the Central Zone. It is alarming that the same players whose fate the selectors are going to decide are trying to get a particular person appointed to that post. Even to the naked eye, the conflict of interest here is blaring.
However, the most phenomenal exposure pertaining to lobbying in India came about when corporate lobbyist Niira Radia was caught on tape trying to influence journalists, senior editors, businessmen and politicians in order to make sure that a particular MP with a tainted record gets the portfolio of Telecommunications and Information Technology. This revelation opened up a can of worms and exposed the depth to which lobbying is playing a role not only in the policy decisions of the government but also in the appointment of the MPs who frame the policies. The sheer extent and brazenness of such lobbying was hitherto unheard of in Indian politics and led to questions being asked as to whether lobbying ought to be legalized subject to regulations just like any other business. However, before analyzing the pros and cons that come with legalizing ‘access to legislators’, it is necessary to get an all-round view of lobbying and its many functions.
This phenomenon of ‘lobbying’ is not new in India; however, it is only recently that it has acquired such an enormous magnitude. Lobbying itself is as old as human civilization. It is one of the many ways in which human beings try to protect and further their own interests. BBC defines the term ‘lobbying’ as coming from the lobbies or hallways of Parliament where MPs and Peers gather before and after debates in the Commons and Lords chambers. People wishing to influence the opinions of MPs or Peers have frequented the lobbies seeking to persuade members of the validity of a particular viewpoint.
Lobbying also underlines one of the ways in which powerful industrial groups buy access to legislators. More often than not, it involves an illegal gratification, either through exchange of money or indirectly by conferring privileges like exclusive VIP tickets for sporting events, travel by private jets, funding election campaigns, etc to the MPs or anyone close to them.
Another view is that lobbying is nothing but a form of advocacy as the purpose of lobbying is to get a group’s point of view across. Not all lobbyists look to employ dubious means to secure their ends; there are some who are genuinely interested in politics and policies of the government and represent a group of people interested in that particular policy.
Closely connected to lobbying is the concept of ‘revolving door of influence’ which is prevalent in the US, UK, France and other countries in the West, and the manifestation of which can be seen in India as well. This term refers to the movement of people with power in the government and in the corporate world.
Investopedia defines it as the movement of high-level employees from public sector jobs to private sector jobs and vice versa. The idea is that there is a revolving door between the two sectors as many legislators and regulators become consultants for the industries they once regulated and some private industry heads receive government appointments that relate to their former private posts. This practice enables the government to obtain the services of people from the industry they intend to regulate and it also affords a good chance to the corporate world use their corporate experience while framing policies and implementing them. One of the most efficient applications of the revolving door has been the appointment of Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys as the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India. His corporate experience was effectively tapped by the government for implementing a project of such a big magnitude. However, the flip side to the concept of revolving door is that when a former bureaucrat is hired by a private sector company immediately after his retirement, or sometimes even induced to resign by a lucrative offer, it may not just be a movement from one sector to another. The intent more often than not is to capitalize on the close connections that the bureaucrat, owing to his experience, is likely to have with the legislators and thereby, get access to the closed rooms of Parliament where future policies are discussed. Such transactions are layered and complex and the conflict of interest and undue misuse of power might be almost impossible to sight. There is rarely any transparency in such transactions as they are not in the public domain, and hence no information can even be sought on it.
It is not that lobbying is without virtues. The obvious advantage of lobbying is that in a thriving democracy like India, where it is impossible for a common man to get himself heard by the policy makers, lobbying is one of the ways in which he can be heard. It is only when many people with common interests come together and form a ‘lobby’ capable of exerting pressure or influencing the policy makers that they will be able to reach out to the people who are in power to take decisions that are likely to affect their interests. Yet another advantage is that the parliamentarians, who often lack the technical expertise and knowledge required in framing certain policies or legislations, get access to in-depth analytical advice on technical issues.
Lobbying in India has no legal status. However, it is deep-rooted and exists in the grey area of law and hence, it is not considered to be a prudent or ethical business practice. It is rather uncommon that a leading businessman in the country does not have a cozy relationship with one politician or the other. The relationship a businessman has with people at the Centre often makes or breaks a lucrative deal for them. Corporate lobbying in India has almost become a formidable, organized industry – with several public relation firms promoting lobbying as a part of their core competence in order to bag top clients. Most of these firms have bureaucrats, even their personal assistants, spouses of politicians and even journalists on their payroll. Some of their tactics include throwing lavish parties, networking, keeping bureaucrats and industrialists in their good books, and even planting stories in favour of their client or against their rivals in leading publications.
Lobbying is common and legal in countries like US, Canada, Germany and France where there are appropriate legislations to regulate the conduct of the lobbyists by making registration compulsory and obligating declarations prescribed. In the US, perhaps the most “thriving” country for lobbyists, lobbying has been interpreted by courts as a part of free speech and thus, protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 in the US lays down regulations which are to be followed by lobbyists. Some of these include compulsory registration with the secretary of the Senate and the clerk of the House of Representatives within 45 days of contacting a legislator for the first time, or 45 days after being employed. Filing must be made each quarter, and a separate file is needed for each of the lobbyist’s clients, and includes information such as the name and title of the client, an estimate of lobbying expenses, and an estimate of income the lobbyist achieved after doing the lobbying. These regulations ensure that bundles of information and statistics are available to the public and journalists to analyse the transactions.
One strong reason to regulate lobbying is that whether or not legal status is afforded to it, lobbying will not cease. It is an open secret of modern-day business. Criminalizing it altogether is not rational as lobbying is also one of the ways in which the legislators may inform themselves of the perspective of varied interest groups with respect to a particular policy. What is required is that lobbying should be made transparent and out in the public like it is in the US. People (voters) not only have the right to know the policies formulated by the parliamentarians, but also have the right to know about the people who influenced them during formulation of such policies .
Another kind of regulation dealing with lobbying is the way in which Japan has regulated‘amakudari’, a practice in which senior politicians retire to executive or high-profile positions within the corporate realm with the government helping them secure private sector jobs. Japanese laws initially prohibited government employees from joining a private company for two years after their retirement if they had a close connection with the company within five years prior to retirement. However, this rule has been repealed now. Similarly, in France, there is a three-year “cooling-off” period before a government employee can move to the private sector. In India, there was a two-year cooling-off period under the All India Service Rules, which has been reduced to one year owing to pressure exerted by IAS officers, who are even against the one-year period. Many bureaucrats have applied to have their cooling-off period waived and have joined private companies related to the sector over which they earlier exercised powers within months of their retirement. So, we have had people from the health ministry joining pharmaceutical giants, and officials from revenue ministry joining financing companies. It is no doubt that greater good will be served if the cool-off period is extended and no waiver is given to any bureaucrat.
However, there are also pitfalls to regulation. Mere disclosure of activities may not be of any help to the naïve public as conflict of interest in such transactions is not easily visible. This is evidenced by the view that lobbying, even though regulated, has spoilt the fabric of the political system in the United States of America. Transparency has not led to more accountability and improvement of social standards as expected. The alleged use of lobbying techniques allowed Enron to make sure it was enlisted in the stock exchange and continued its activities, withholding from the shareholders the fact that they were buying shares of a company that is collapsing. Yet another factor to consider is that even when there is legislation, there will be people who will still discreetly try to influence the government using channels that are not in the public domain. In a country like India, where politics reeks of nepotism, the possibility of this happening is not meek.
Lobbying is a stark reality, and it is going to impossible to ignore it. If not a new legislation altogether, certain tweaks in the existing legislations to ensure transparency and accountability might serve as an example of the results legislation is likely to yield. Such changes could be in the form of mandatory disclosure of all meetings that a minister, registration of lobbyists and a cap on the money permitted to be spent by lobbyists to ensure that it is not just the rich group that is able to lobby. It is time to accept lobbying as a fact of the modern capitalistic world and make attempts to bring in accountability and transparency, rather than pretending that it does not exist
PM constitutes National Committee on Direct Cash Transfers
January 9, 2013 at 7:40 am | Posted in People | Comments Offhttp://netindian.in/news/2012/10/25/00021861/pm-constitutes-national-committee-direct-cash-transfers
PM constitutes National Committee on Direct Cash Transfers
NetIndian News Network
New Delhi, October 25, 2012
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Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has constituted a coordination committee called the National Committee on Direct Cash Transfers as a mechanism to coordinate action for the introduction of direct cash transfers to individuals under the various government schemes and programmes.
The committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, will have as its members eleven Cabinet Ministers, two Ministers of State with independent charge, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission , the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and the Cabinet Secretary, with the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister as its convener.
The Prime Minister may invite any other Minister/officer/expert to any meeting of the committee, an official press release said.
According to it, the committee would engage in the following tasks:
a) Provide an overarching vision and direction to enable direct cash transfers of benefits under various government schemes and programmes to individuals, leveraging the investments being made in the Aadhaar Project, financial inclusion and other initiatives of the Government, with the objective of enhancing efficiency, transparency and accountability.
b) Determine broad policy objectives and strategies for direct cash transfers.
c) Identify Government programmes and schemes for which direct cash transfers to individuals can be adopted and suggest the extent and scope of direct cash transfers in each case.
d) Coordinate the activities of various Ministries/ Departments/ Agencies involved in enabling direct cash transfers and ensure timely, coordinated action to ensure speedy rollout of direct cash transfers across the country.
e) Specify timelines for the rollout of direct cash transfers.
f) Review the progress of implementation of direct cash transfers and provide guidance for mid-course corrections.
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g) Any other related matter.
The National Committee on Cash Transfers will be assisted by an Executive Committee on Direct Cash Transfers chaired by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and the Secretaries of the concerned Ministries and the Director General, UIDAI. The Secretary, Planning Commission will be the convener.
The Executive Committee on Direct Cash Transfers would engage in the following tasks:
a) Identify and propose for the consideration of the National Committee on Cash Transfers such Government programmes and schemes for which direct cash transfers to individuals can be adopted and suggest the extent and scope of direct cash transfers in each case.
b) Ensure the preparation of and approve strategies and action plans for the speedy rollout of direct cash transfers in areas agreed to and in line with the timelines laid down by the National Committee on Cash Transfers.
c) Coordinate the activities of various Ministries/ Departments / Agencies involved in enabling direct cash transfers to ensure that the architecture and framework for direct cash transfers is in place for rolling out direct cash transfers across the country.
d) Review and monitor the rollout of direct cash transfers and undertake mid-course corrections as and when necessary.
e) Any other related matter entrusted by the National Committee on Cash Transfers or relating to direct cash transfers.
The Chairman may invite any other Officer/Expert to any meeting of the Executive Committee as may be necessary.
The National Committee and the Executive Committee would be serviced by the Planning Commission, which may obtain assistance as required from any Ministry/Department/Agency of the Government in this task. The Planning Commission will designate an officer of the rank of Joint Secretary in the Planning Commission to coordinate and service the work of the National Committee and Executive Committee.
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In order to finalise the operational and implementation details relating to the design and implementation of the direct cash transfer system, and for ensuring a smooth roll-out of direct cash transfers in an orderly and timely fashion, Mission Mode Committees will be constituted.
These will be:
a) Technology Committee to focus on the technology, payment architecture and IT issues.
b) Financial Inclusion Committee to focus on ensuring universal access to banking and ensuring complete financial inclusion.
c) Implementation Committees on Electronic Transfer of Benefits at the Ministry/ Department level to work out the details of cash transfers for each department such as data bases, direct cash transfer rules and control and audit mechanisms.
The notifications for these three committees will be issued in due course.
The composition of the National Committee on Direct Cash Transfers is as follows:
1. Prime Minister (Chairperson), 2. Finance Minister, 3. Minister of Communications & IT,
4. Minister of Rural Development, 5. Minister of Social Justice & Empowerment, 6. Minister of Human Resource Development, 7. Minister of Tribal Affairs, 8. Minister of Minority Affairs, 9. Minister of Health & Family Welfare, 10. Minister of Labour & Employment, 11. Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas, 12. Minister of Chemicals & Fertilizers, 13. Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, 14. Minister of State (i/c) of Food & Public Distribution, 15. Minister of State (i/c) of Women & Child Development, 16. Chairman, UIDAI, 17.Cabinet Secretary and 18.Principal Secretary to PM (Convener).
Electronic Voting Machines Still Widely Used Despite Security Concerns
January 9, 2013 at 7:39 am | Posted in Technology | Comments OffElectronic Voting Machines Still Widely Used Despite Security Concerns
Posted: 10/22/2012 3:51 pm EDT
For years, researchers have been aware of numerous security flaws in electronic voting machines. They’ve found ways to hack the machines to swap votes between candidates, reject ballots or accept 50,000 votes from a precinct with just 100 voters.
Yet on Nov. 6, millions of voters — including many in hotly contested swing states — will cast ballots on e-voting machines that researchers have found are vulnerable to hackers. What is more troubling, say some critics, is that election officials have no way to verify that votes are counted accurately because some states do not use e-voting machines that produce paper ballots.
After the “hanging chad” controversy of the 2000 election, Congress passed a federal law that gave states funding to replace their punch card and lever voting systems with electronic voting machines. But computer scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that a variety of electronic voting machines can be hacked — often quite easily.
“Every time they are studied, we find further problems,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who researches voting machine security.
“It’s simply a matter of reprogramming these machines to be dishonest,” Halderman added. “That’s what we found six years ago and it’s still true today, and many of these machines are still in use.”
In 2008, researchers at Princeton University found that it took seven minutes, using simple tools, to install a different computer program in a voting machine “that steals votes from one party’s candidates, and gives them to another.” That machine, the Sequoia Avantage, is still used in at least six states by 9 million voters, according to Roger Johnston, who heads the vulnerability assessment team at Argonne National Laboratory.
Last fall, Johnston and his team of researchers found that Diebold’s AccuVote voting machines could be hacked to change voting results by inserting a piece of electronics into the machines. Diebold’s AccuVote voting machines are used in at least 20 states by 21 million voters, according to Johnston.
“I’ve seen high school science fair projects that are more sophisticated than what is needed to hijack a voting machine,” Johnston said in an interview.
Most voting machines are made by two manufacturers, Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, which was formerly Diebold Election Systems. Neither company returned requests for comment.
Researchers say it’s difficult to determine whether voting machine manufacturers have fixed cyber-security flaws because the companies do not share their software code publicly. In addition, there is little pressure on them from elections officials to do so, Johnston said.
“The voting manufacturers are in denial,” Johnston said. “They are not doing anything about these problems, but their customers are not asking them to, either.”
However, there is no evidence that hackers have ever manipulated votes in a U.S. election, experts say. And many election officials insist security concerns about voting machines are overblown. They say that security on Election Day is much stricter than, say, what a team of computer scientists with unlimited time in a laboratory might face to hack a voting machine.
“It’s important to keep in mind that having full and open access to these systems is quite different than how these systems are available to voters on Election Day,” said Jessica Myers, a voting systems certification specialist at U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which certifies e-voting machines.
Butler County, Ohio — in a key swing state with more than 240,000 registered voters — has been using AccuVote machines since 2005, according to Lynn Kinkaid, director of the county board of elections. One reason they still use the machines is that “elderly people like them because you can enlarge the print,” he said.
Kinkaid said the county’s e-voting machines are tested before each election, encrypted and not connected to the Internet.
“We are very sure our machines are safe and secure,” he said.
Lehigh County, Pa., which has about 236,000 registered voters in another swing state, has been using Accuvote voting machines since 2006, according to Tim Benyo, the county’s chief clerk for registration and elections.
Benyo said the county’s e-voting machines are certified by the state, and prior to Election Day, they are locked, sealed and never left alone. He said there have been “slight modifications” to the machines’ software over the years, “but nothing drastic.”
“I am familiar with some reports of them being able to be hacked,” Benyo said. “But my concerns are limited because these machines are not left alone with anybody for a long enough period of time.”
However, Halderman, of the University of Michigan, was part of a team of researchers in 2006 that found a hacker with access to an AccuVote voting machine for just one minute could install malicious code on the machine to steal votes.
Lehigh County’s e-voting machines do not produce a paper record for voters because it is not required by the state, Benyo said. One-quarter of registered voters nationwide will cast ballots on Nov. 6 using electronic voting machines that do not produce paper ballots, according to VerifiedVoting.org, a nonprofit whose mission is to safeguard elections in the digital age.
Without paper ballots — which are counted using optical scan systems — elections officials have no way to go back and conduct an audit to see whether votes were counted correctly, security researchers say.
“You really can’t tell whether vote totals are accurate unless you have a paper ballot,” said David Dill, founder of VerifiedVoting.org.
In 2006, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill that called for state election officials to stop using Diebold’s AccuVote-TSx touchscreen systems, which the state has used since 2002, because the machines contained security flaws and did not produce a paper record, according to Computer World magazine.
But after the law passed, Gov. Martin O’Malley chose not to fund the purchase of new e-voting machines that produce paper ballots, according to Donna Duncan, a spokeswoman for the Maryland State Board of Elections. On Nov. 6, polling places across Maryland will still use AccuVote touchscreen machines that don’t produce paper ballots.
“We have absolute confidence in the voting equipment,” Duncan said. “The security measures we put in place, we believe, are sufficient.”
Rethinking DNA Profiling in India
January 9, 2013 at 7:37 am | Posted in Critical Perspectives, Technology | Comments Offhttp://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/rethinking-dna-profiling-india.html
Rethinking DNA Profiling in India
Vol – XLVII No. 43, October 27, 2012 | Elonnai Hickok Web Exclusives
DNA profile databases can be useful tools in solving crime, but given that the DNA profile of a person can reveal very personal information about the individual, including medical history, family history and so on, a more comprehensive legislation regulating the collection, use, analysis and storage of DNA samples needs included in the draft Human DNA Profiling Bill.
Elonnai Hickok (elonnai@cis-india.org) is a Policy Associate with the Centre for Internet and Society.
DNA evidence was first accepted by the courts in India in 1985 1, and in 2005 the Criminal Code of Procedure was amended to allow for medical practitioners, after authorisation from a police officer who is not below the rank of sub-inspector, to examine a person arrested on the charge of committing an offence and with reasonable grounds that an examination of the individual will bring to light evidence regarding the offence. This can include
“the examination of blood, blood stains, semen, swabs in case of sexual offences, sputum and sweat, hair samples, and finger nail clippings, by the use of modern and scientific techniques including DNA profiling and such other tests which the registered medical practitioner thinks necessary in a particular case”.2
Though this provision establishes that authorisation is needed for collection of DNA samples, defines who can collect samples, creates permitted circumstances for collection, and lists material that can be collected, among other things, it does not address how the collected DNA evidence should be handled, and what will happen to the evidence after it is collected and analysed. These gaps in the provision indicate the need for a more comprehensive legislation regulating the collection, use, analysis and storage of DNA samples, including for crime-related purposes in India.
The initiative to draft a Bill regulating the use of DNA samples for crime-related reasons began in 2003, when the Department of Biotechnology (DoB) established a committee known as the DNA Profiling Advisory Committee to make recommendations for the drafting of the DNA profiling Bill 2006, which eventually became the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2007.3. The 2007 draft Bill was prepared by the DoB along with the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD).4 The CDFD is an autonomous institution supported by the DoB. In addition to the CDFD, there are multiple Central Forensic Science Laboratories in India under the control of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Central Bureau of Investigation5, along with a number of private labs6 which analyse DNA samples for crime-related purposes.
In 2007, the draft Human DNA Profiling Bill was made public, but was never introduced in Parliament. In February 2012, a new version of the Bill was leaked. If passed, the Bill will establish state-level DNA databases which will feed into a national-level DNA database, and proposes to regulate the use of DNA for the purposes of
“enhancing protection of people in the society and the administration of justice”.7
The Bill will also establish a DNA Profiling Board responsible for 24 functions, including specifying the list of instances for human DNA profiling and the sources of collection, enumerating guidelines for storage and destruction of biological samples, and laying down standards and procedures for establishment and functioning of DNA laboratories and DNA Data Banks.8 The lack of harmonisation and clear policy indicates that there is a need in India for standardising the collection and use of DNA samples. Although DNA evidence can be useful for solving crimes, the current 2012 draft Bill is missing critical safeguards and technical standards essential to preventing the misuse of DNA and protecting individual rights.
Concerns that have been raised with regards to the Bill are both intrinsic, including problems with effectiveness of achieving the set objectives, and extrinsic, including concerns with the fundamental principles of the Bill. For example, the use of DNA material as evidence and the subsequent creation of a DNA database can be useful for solving crimes when the database contains DNA profiles 9 from DNA samples10 only from crime scenes, and is restricted to DNA profiles from individuals who might be repeat offenders. If a wide range of DNA profiles are added to the database, the effectiveness of the database decreases, and the likelihood of a false match increases as the ability to correctly identify a criminal depends on the number of crime scene DNA profiles on the database, and the number of false matches that occur is proportional to the number of comparisons made (more comparisons = more false matches).11 This inverse relationship between the effectiveness of the DNA database and the size of the database was found in the UK when it was proven that the expansion of the UK DNA database did not help to solve more crimes, despite millions of profiles being added to the database.12
The current scope of the draft 2012 Bill is not limited to crimes for which samples can be taken and placed in the database. Instead the Bill creates indexes within every databank including: crime scene indexes, suspects index, offender’s index, missing persons index, unknown deceased persons’ index, volunteers’ index, and such other DNA indices as may be specified by regulations made by the Board.13 How independent each of these indices are, is unclear. For example, the Bill does not specify when a profile is searched for in the database – if all indices are searched, or if only the relevant indices are searched, and the Bill requires that when a DNA profile is added to the databank, it must be compared with all the existing profiles.14 The Bill also lists a range of offences for which DNA profiling will be applicable and DNA samples collected, and used for the identification of the perpetrator including, unnatural offences, individual identification, issues relating to assisted reproductive technologies, adultery, outraging the modesty of women etc.15 Though the Bill is not incorrect in its list of offences where DNA profiling could be applicable, it is unclear if DNA profiles from all the listed offenses will be stored on the database. If it is the case that the DNA profiles will be stored, it would make the scope of the database too broad.
Unlike other types of identifiers, such as fingerprints, DNA can reveal very personal information about an individual, including medical history, family history and location.16 Thus, having a DNA database with a broad scope and adding more DNA profiles onto a database, increases the potential for misuse of information stored on the database, because there is more opportunity for profiling, tracking of individuals, and access to private data. In its current form, the Bill protects against such misuse to a certain extent by limiting the information that will be stored with a DNA profile and in the indices,17 but the Bill does not make it clear if the DNA profiles of individuals convicted for a crime will be stored and searched independently from other profiles. Additionally, though the Bill limits the use of DNA profiles and DNA samples to identification of perpetrators18, it allows for DNA profiles/DNA samples and related information related to be shared for creation and maintenance of a population statistics database that is to be used, as prescribed, for the purpose of identification research, protocol development, or quality control provided that it does not contain any personally identifiable information and does not violate ethical norms.”19
An indication of the possibility of how a DNA database could be misused in India can be seen in the CDFD’s stated objectives, where it lists “to create DNA marker databases of different caste populations of India.”20 CDFD appears to be collecting this data by requiring caste and origin of state to be filled in on the identification form that is submitted with any DNA sample.21 Though an argument could be made that this information could be used for research purposes, there appears to be no framework over the use of this information and this objective. Is the information stored along with the DNA sample? Is it used in criminal cases? Is it revealed during court cases or at other points of time?
Similarly, in the Report of the Working Group for the Eleventh Five Year Plan, it lists the following as a possible use of DNA profiling technology:
“Human population analysis with a view to elicit profiling of different caste populations of India to use them in forensic DNA fingerprinting and develop DNA databases.”22
This objective is based on the assumption that caste is an immutable genetic trait and seems to ignore the fact that individuals change their caste and that caste is not uniformly passed on in marriage. Furthermore, using caste for forensic purposes and to develop DNA databases could far too easily be abused and result in the profiling of individuals, and identification errors. For example, in 2011 the UK police, in an attempt to catch the night stalker Delroy Grant, used DNA to (incorrectly) predict that he originated from the Winward Islands. The police then used mass DNA screenings of black men. The police initially eliminated Delroy Grant as a suspect because another Delroy Grant was on the DNA database, and the real Delroy Grant was eventually caught when the police pursued more traditional forms of investigation.23
Other uses for DNA databases and DNA samples in India have been envisioned over the years. For example, in 2010 the state of Tamil Nadu sought to amend the Prisoners Identification Act 1920 to allow for the establishment of a prisoners’ DNA database – which would require that any prisoner’s DNA be collected and stored.24 In another example, the home page of BioAxis DNA Research Centre (P) Limited, a private DNA laboratory offering forensic services states, “In a country like India which is densely populated there is huge requirement for these type of databases which may help in stopping different types of fraud like Ration card fraud, Voter ID Card fraud, Driving license fraud etc. The database may help the Indian police to differentiate the criminals and non criminals.”25 Not only is this statement incorrect in stating that a DNA database will differentiate between criminals and non-criminals, but DNA evidence is not useful in stopping ration card fraud etc. as it would require that DNA be extracted and authenticated for every instance of service. In 2012, the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology at AFMC Pune proposed to establish a DNA data bank containing profiles of armed forces personnel.26 And in Uttar Pradesh, the government ordered mandatory sampling for DNA fingerprinting of dead bodies.27 These examples raise important questions about the scope of use, collection and storage of DNA profiles in databases that the Bill is silent on.
The assumption in the Bill that DNA evidence is infallible is another point of contention. The preamble of the Bill states that, “DNA analysis of body substances is a powerful technology that makes it possible to determine whether the source of origin of one body substance is identical to that of another, and further to establish the biological relationship, if any, between two individuals, living or dead with any doubt.”28 This statement ignores the possibility of false matches, cross-contamination, and laboratory error29 as DNA evidence is only as infallible as the humans collecting, analysing, and marshalling the evidence. These mistakes are not purely speculative, as cases that have relied on DNA as evidence in India demonstrate that the reliability of DNA evidence is questionable due to collection, analysis, and chain of custody errors. For example, in the Aarushi murder case the forensic expert who testified failed to remember which samples were collected at the scene of the crime30; in the French diplomat rape case, the DNA report came out with both negative and positive results;31 and in the Abhishek rape case the DNA sample had to be reanalysed after initial analysis did not prove conclusive.32 Yet the Bill does not mandate a set of best practices that could help in minimising these errors, such as defining what profiling system will be used nationally, and defining specific security measures that must be taken by DNA laboratories – all of which are currently left to be determined by the DNA board.33
The assumption in the preamble that DNA can establish if a relationship exists between two individuals without a doubt is also misleading as it implies that the use of DNA samples and the creation of a database will increase the conviction rate, when in actuality the exact number of accurate convictions resulting purely from DNA evidence is unknown, as is the number of innocent people who are falsely accused of a crime based on DNA evidence in India. This misconception is reflected on the website of the Department of Biotechnology’s information page for CDFD where it states:
“…The DNA fingerprinting service, given the fact that it has been shown to bring about dramatic increase in the conviction rate, will continue to be in much demand. With the crime burden on the society increasing, more and more requests for DNA fingerprinting are naturally anticipated. For example, starting from just a few cases of DNA fingerprinting per month, CDFD is now handling similar number of cases every day.”34
In addition to the claim that the DNA fingerprinting service has shown a dramatic increase in the conviction rate, is not supported by evidence in this article, according to the CDFD 2010-2011 annual report, the centre analysed DNA from 57 cases of deceased persons, 40 maternity/paternity cases, four rape and murder cases, eight sexual assault cases, and three kidney transplantation cases.35 This is in comparison to the 2006 – 2007 annual report, which quoted 83 paternity/maternity dispute cases, 68 identification of deceased, 11 cases of sexual assault, eight cases of murder, and two cases of wildlife poaching.36 From the numbers quoted in the CDFD annual report, it appears that paternity/maternity cases and identification of the deceased are the most frequent types of cases using DNA evidence.
Other concerns with the Bill include access controls to the database and rights of the individual. For example, the Bill does not require that a court order be issued for access to a DNA profile, and instead leaves it in the hand of the DNA bank manager to determine if communication of information relating to a match to a court, tribunal, law enforcement agency, or DNA laboratory is appropriate37. Additionally, the Data Bank Manager is empowered to grant access to any information on the database to any person or class of persons that he/she considers appropriate for the purposes of proper operation and maintenance or for training purposes.38 The low standards for access that are found in the Bill are worrisome as the possibility for tampering of evidence and analysis is increased.
The Bill is also missing important provisions that would be necessary to protect the rights of the individual. For example, individuals are not permitted a private cause of action for the unlawful collection, use, or retention of DNA, and individuals do not have the right to access their own information stored on the database.39 These are significant gaps in the proposed legislation as it restricts the rights of the individual.
In conclusion, India could benefit from having a legislation regulating, standardising, and harmonising the use, collection, analysis, and retention of DNA samples for crime-related purposes. The current 2012 draft of the Bill is a step in the right direction, and an improvement from the 2007 DNA Profiling Bill. The 2012 draft draws upon best practices from the US and Canada, but could also benefit from drawing upon best practices from countries like Scotland. Safeguards missing from the current draft that would strengthen the Bill include: limiting the scope of the DNA database to include only samples from a crime scene for serious crimes and not minor offenses, requiring the destruction of DNA samples once a DNA profile is created, clearly defining when a court order is needed to collect DNA samples, defining when consent is required and is not required from the individual for a DNA sample to be taken, and ensuring that the individual has a right of appeal.
1 Law Commission of India. Review of the Indian Evidence Act 1872. Pg. 43 Available at:http://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/reports/185thReport-PartII.pdf. Last accessed: October 9th 2012.
2 Section 53. The Criminal Code of Procedure, 1973. Available at:http://www.vakilno1.com/bareacts/crpc/s53.htm. Last accessed October 9th 2012.
3 Department of Biotechnology. Ministry of Science & Technology GOI. Annual Report 2009 – 2010. pg. 189. Available at: http://dbtindia.nic.in/annualreports/DBT-An-Re-2009-10.pdf. Last Accessed October 9th 2012.
4 Chhibber, M. Govt Crawling on DNA Profiling Bill, CBI urges it to hurry, cites China. The Indian Express. July 12 2010. Available at: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/govt-crawling-on-dna-profiling-bill-cbi-urges-it-to-hurry-cites-china/645247/0. Last accessed: October 9th 2012.
5 Perspective Plan for Indian Forensics. Final report 2010. Table 64.1 -64.3 pg. 264-267. Available at: http://mha.nic.in/pdfs/IFS%282010%29-FinalRpt.pdf. Last accessed: October 9th 2012. And CBI Manual. Chapter 27. Available at: http://mha.nic.in/pdfs/IFS%282010%29-FinalRpt.pdf. Last accessed: October 9th 2012.
6 For example: International Forensic Sciences, DNA Labs India (DLI), Truth Labs and Bio-Axis DNA Research Centre (P) Limited
7 Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012. Introduction
8 Id. section 12(a-z)
9 Id. Definition l. “DNA Profile” means results of analysis of a DNA sample with respect to human identification.
10 Id. Definition m. “DNA sample” means biological specimen of any nature that is utilized to conduct CAN analysis, collected in such manner as specified in Part II of the Schedule.
11 The UK DNA database and the European Court of Human Rights: Lessons India can learn from UK mistakes. PowerPoint Presentation. Dr. Helen Wallace, Genewatch UK. September 2012.
12 Hope, C. Crimes solved by DNA evidence fall despite millions being added to database. The Telegraph. November 12th 2008. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/3418649/Crimes-solved-by-DNA-evidence-fall-despite-millions-being-added-to-database.html. Last accessed: October 9th 2012
13 Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012. Section 32 (4(a-g))
14 Id. Section 35
15 Id. Schedule: List of applicable instances of Human DNA Profiling and Sources of Collection of Samples for DNA Test.
16 Gruber J. Forensic DNA Databases. Council for Responsible Genetics. September 2012. Powerpoint presentation
17 Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012. Section 32 (5)-((6)(a)-(b)). Indices will only contain DNA identification records and analysis prepared by the laboratory and approved by the DNA Board, while profiles in the offenders index will contain only the identity of the person, and other profiles will contain only the case reference number.
18 Id. Section 39
19 Id. Section 40(c)
20 CDFD. Annual Report 2010-2011. Pg19. Available at:http://www.cdfd.org.in/images/AR_2010_11.pdf. Last accessed: October 9th 2012.
21 Caste and origin of state is a field of information that is required to be completed when an ‘identification form’ is sent to the CDFD along with a DNA sample for analysis. Form available at:http://www.cdfd.org.in/servicespages/dnafingerprinting.html
22 Report of the Working Group for the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007 – 2012). October 2006. Pg. 152. Section: R&D Relating Services. Available at:http://planningcommission.nic.in/aboutus/committee/wrkgrp11/wg11_subdbt.pdf. Last accessed: October 9th 2012
23 Evans. M. Night Stalker: police blunders delayed arrest of Delroy Grant. March 24th 2011. The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8397585/Night-Stalker-police-blunders-delayed-arrest-of-Delroy-Grant.html. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
24 Narayan, P. A prisoner DNA database: Tamil Nadu shows the way. May 17th 2012. Available at:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/A-prisoner-DNA-database-Tamil-Nadu-shows-the-way/iplarticleshow/5938522.cms. Last accessed: October 9th 2012.
25 BioAxis DNA Research Centre (P) Limited. Website Available at: http://www.dnares.in/dna-databank-database-of-india.php. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
26Times of India. AFMC to open DNA profiling centre today. February 2012. Available at:http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-02-08/pune/31037108_1_dna-profile-dna-fingerprinting-data-bank. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
27Siddiqui, P. UP makes DNA sampling mandatory with postmortem. Times of India. September 4th 2012. Available at:http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-09-04/lucknow/33581061_1_dead-bodies-postmortem-house-postmortem-report. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
28 Draft DNA Human Profiling Bill 2012. Introduction
29 Council for Responsible Genetics. Overview and Concerns Regarding the Indian Draft DNA Profiling Bill. September 2012. Pg. 2. Available at: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/indian-draft-dna-profiling-act.pdf/view. Last accessed: October 9th 2012.
30 DNA. Aarushi case: Expert forgets samples collected from murder spot. August 28th 2012. Available at: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_aarushi-case-expert-forgets-samples-collected-from-murder-spot_1733957. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
31 India Today. Daughter rape case: French diplomat’s DNA test is inconclusive. July 7th 2012. Available at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/french-diplomat-father-rapes-daughter-dna-test-bangalore/1/204270.html. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
32 The Times of India. DNA tests indicate Abhishek raped woman. May 30th 2006. Available at:http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2006-05-30/india/27826225_1_abhishek-kasliwal-dna-fingerprinting-dna-tests. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
33 Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012. Section 18-27.
34 Department of Biotechnology. DNA Fingerprinting & Diagnostics, Hyderabad. Available at:http://dbtindia.nic.in/uniquepage.asp?id_pk=124. Last accessed: October 10 2012.
35 CDFD Annual Report 2010 – 2011.Pg.19. Available at:http://www.cdfd.org.in/images/AR_2010_11.pdf. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
36 CDFD Annual Report 2006-2007.Pg. 13. Available at:http://www.cdfd.org.in/images/AR_2006_07.pdf. Last accessed: October 10th 2012.
37 Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012. Section 35
38 Id. Section 41.
39 Council for Responsible Genetics. Overview and Concerns Regarding the Indian Draft DNA Profiling Bill. September 2012. Pg. 9 Available at: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/indian-draft-dna-profiling-act.pdf/view. Last accessed: October 9th 2012.
Is Sonia abdicating leadership?
January 9, 2013 at 7:35 am | Posted in Arguments Against | Comments Offhttp://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-139869-Is-Sonia-abdicating-leadership
Is Sonia abdicating leadership?
Praful Bidwai
Saturday, October 27, 2012
From Print Edition
The fanfare with which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi launched a public service delivery scheme in Rajasthan based on the Aadhaar (literally, foundation) unique identity (UID) number, and celebrated the issue of 200 million Aadhaar numbers nationally, should make the Indian National Congress a very worried party indeed – assuming it has good survival instinct.
To put it starkly, the Congress and with it, the United Progressive Alliance, are sleepwalking into a minefield with plans to roll out Aadhaar-enabled service delivery schemes in 51 districts in India, and later extend them to the entire country.
The Aadhaar-UID system is fraught with serious problems , which will affect poor people the most. To make entitlement to the Public Distribution System (for food), payment of wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and delivery of old-age pensions and scholarship payment Aadhaar-dependent is to expose them to unacceptable risk. Yet, the Rajasthan government has linked these and six more schemes to Aadhaar, including entitlements to subsidised medical treatment, rural housing for those officially recognised as BPL (living below-poverty-line), and payment to rural women who raise public awareness about health, nutrition and sanitation.
What’s wrong with Aadhaar? First of all, the 12-digit identity number generated by the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) for each citizen is neither unique nor reliable. Aadhaar’s biometric techniques, involving a photograph, fingerprints and an iris scan, are untested. Experts point to many possible technical errors, including indistinct fingerprints due to calluses, and poor iris scans due to cataracts. The UIDAI mission director himself admits that fingerprints aren’t likely to work reliably for authentication. These errors could end up excluding up to 15 percent of the population.
Second, Aadhaar is susceptible to the same factors – bureaucratic lethargy, callousness towards the poor, and influence of the powerful – that result in inaccurate compilation of BPL lists, leading to the exclusion of 40 percent of poor people in many cases, and the inclusion of many non-poor.
Third, last year Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance rejected the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010, and termed the project “directionless” and “conceptualised with no clarity of purpose”. It also called the technology used “untested, unproven, unreliable and unsafe”. It raised concerns about privacy, identity theft, misuse, security of data and its duplication, and also noted the Planning Commission’s objections to Aadhaar.
These are matters of great gravity. No computer is foolproof against hacking; and data loss or theft has serious consequences. The committee strongly disapproved of the hasty manner in which the UID scheme was approved and implemented as “unethical and violative of Parliament’s prerogatives”.
Faced with these objections, UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani promised that Aadhaar would not be used as mandatory proof of identity for the provision of public services. But actual experience flies in the face of this. Indeed, it is proposed to make Aadhaar compulsory even for opening a bank account, and eventually convert all entitlements into Aadhaar-based cash transfers. Every exclusion of the genuinely poor from Aadhaar will heap yet more injustice upon them and cost the UPA votes.
Even more politically disastrous is the UPA’s deception and vacillation on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Bill. Land is probably the most important site of people’s struggles in defence of their livelihoods and survival rights.
The Bill was to be a generous improvement over the colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894 and touted as a major gain for farmers, and a great legacy of UPA-2, comparable to UPA-1’s NREGA. Originally, it was to exclude tribal lands and limit acquisition of irrigated multi-cropped land to five percent of the total, to require the consent of 80 percent of both land losers and livelihood losers (e.g. agricultural workers, rural artisans, etc), to apply to ongoing land acquisition, and to provide compensation at four to six times the market value of land.
All this was diluted under pressure from the industry and urban development ministries to make the Bill “investor-friendly”. In the group of ministers (GoM) headed by agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, said to be one of India’s biggest landowners, the 80 percent consent norm was downgraded to two-thirds of land losers – never mind the livelihood losers. Tribal land can be acquired, if as the “last resort”.
The proposed national manufacturing and investment zones (NMIZs) have been exempted from the Bill. It will only apply to future, not ongoing, land acquisitions. There will be a “sliding scale” of compensation, of between two and four times the market value. Besides, “linear projects” like railways, highways and power lines are exempted altogether.
Relief and rehabilitation obligations on private buyers, earlier mandatory for acquisitions above 100 acres, have been left to the discretion of the states. Promoters will only make a one-off payment into an escrow account and won’t build infrastructure for the affected people. The account will be managed by a special agency. It is not clear how responsive it will be.
Sonia Gandhi has intervened to restore the 80 percent consent norm for land losers, but that only partially undoes the harm. Even in its slightly improved form, the LARR Bill would at best be a cosmetic improvement over the 1894 Act. The National Alliance of People’s Movements says it will transfer “precious natural resources to private corporations and fuel corruption and land conflict”. The Bill’s main positive feature is that it mandates a Social Impact Assessment, including whether a project serves a public purpose, and evaluate its costs for the project-affected families, with public hearings. The SIA report would be examined by an expert group, with some non-governmental representatives, including two social scientists.
However, as past experience with the corrupted Environmental Impact Assessment process shows, the SIA is no guarantee that the project will be properly assessed. Besides, the Bill has accepted the industry lobby’s demand that the SIA be completed within six months – an almost impossible task if an in-depth assessment is to be made and scrutinised.
India has displaced 60 million people from land since Independence – the population of Britain. Land has become the hottest subject of contestation between the people, on the one hand, and corporate interests and the state, on the other. Not only is land crucial to people’s right to live, it is also tied up with control over the natural resources it holds, including water, forests and minerals.
Under the present neoliberal model of capitalism, corporations invade nature in ways they have never done before. They take over land – and why, water and air – and forcibly turn them into commodities. All Third World countries, especially fast-growing ones, are witnessing a modified repetition of what England saw in the 18 century – enclosures of the Commons, or common property resources, including farmland and pastures – only at a faster pace, and with greater ruthlessness.
The UPA is facilitating this in India to feed corporate greed. Clearly, Sonia Gandhi has decided to abdicate her responsibility to exercise a moderating influence on the UPA and push pro-people measures. She has probably convinced herself, perhaps against her own instincts, that GDP growth is all-important; to engineer it, India needs investment, whatever the cost. The UPA will end up paying heavily for this Himalayan misjudgment.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi. Email: prafulbidwai1 @yahoo.co.in
US case puts face on ‘total identity theft’ng Services
January 9, 2013 at 7:33 am | Posted in Fake ID's, Int'l NID Card | Comments Offhttp://www.indianexpress.com/news/us-case-puts-face-on-total-identity-theft/1021045/0
US case puts face on ‘total identity theft’ng Services
Agencies : Wichita, Tue Oct 23 2012, 18:06 hrs
When Candida L. Gutierrez’s identity was stolen, the thief didn’t limit herself to opening fraudulent credit and bank accounts. She assumed Gutierrez’s persona completely, using it to get a job, a driver’s license, a mortgage and even medical care for the birth of two children.
All the while, the crook claimed the real Gutierrez was the one who had stolen her identity. The women’s unusual tug-of-war puts a face on “total identity theft”, a brazen form of the crime in which con artists go beyond financial fraud to assume many other aspects of another person’s life.
The scheme has been linked to illegal immigrants who use stolen Social Security numbers to get paid at their jobs, and authorities fear the problem could soon grow to ensnare more unsuspecting Americans.
“When she claimed my identity and I claimed it back, she was informed that I was claiming it too,” said Gutierrez, a 31-year-old elementary schoolteacher. “She knew I was aware and that I was trying to fight, and yet she would keep fighting. It is not like she realized and she stopped. No, she kept going, and she kept going harder.”
A 32-year-old illegal immigrant named Benita Cardona-Gonzalez is accused of using Gutierrez’s identity during a 10-year period when she worked at a Topeka company that packages refrigerated foods.
For years, large numbers of illegal immigrants have filled out payroll forms using their real names but stolen Social Security numbers. However, as electronic employment verification systems such as E-Verify become more common, the use of fake numbers is increasingly difficult. Now prosecutors worry that more people will try to fool the systems by assuming full identities rather than stealing the numbers alone.
For victims, total identity theft can also have serious health consequences if electronic medical records linked to Social Security numbers get mixed up, putting at risk the accuracy of important patient information such as blood types or life-threatening allergies.
Federal Trade Commission statistics show that Americans reported more than 2,79,000 instances of identity theft in 2011, up from 2,51,100 a year earlier. While it is unclear how many of those cases involve total identity theft, one possible indicator is the number of identity theft complaints that involve more than one type of identity theft — 13 per cent last year, compared with 12 per cent a year earlier.
Nationwide, employment-related fraud accounted for 8 per cent of identity theft complaints last year. But in states with large immigrant populations, employment-related identity fraud was much higher: 25 per cent in Arizona, 15 per cent in Texas, 16 per cent in New Mexico, 12 per cent in California.
Prosecutors say that the longer a person uses someone else’s identity, the more confident the thief becomes using that identity for purposes other than just working.
Once they have become established in a community, identity thieves don’t want to live in the shadows and seek a normal life like everybody else. That’s when they take the next step and get a driver’s license, a home loan and health insurance.
“And so that is a natural progression, and that is what we are seeing,” said Assistant US Attorney Brent Anderson, who is prosecuting the case against Gutierrez’s imposter.
Gutierrez first learned her identity had been hijacked when she was turned down for a mortgage more than a decade ago. Now each year she trudges to the Social Security Administration with her birth certificate, driver’s license, passport and even school yearbooks to prove her identity and clear her employment record.
She spends hours on the phone with creditors and credit bureaus, fills out affidavits and has yet to clean up her credit history. Her tax records are a mess. She even once phoned the imposter’s Kansas employer in a futile effort to find some relief.
Both women claimed they were identity theft victims and sought to get new Social Security numbers. The Social Security Administration turned down the request from Gutierrez, instead issuing a new number to the woman impersonating her. And in another ironic twist, Gutierrez was forced to file her federal income tax forms using a special identification number usually reserved for illegal immigrants.
“It is such a horrible nightmare,” Gutierrez said. “You get really angry, and then you start realizing anger is not going to help. … But when you have so much on your plate and you keep such a busy life, it is really such a super big inconvenience. You have to find the time for someone who is abusing you.”
When Gutierrez recently got married, her husband began researching identity theft on the Internet and stumbled across identity theft cases filed against other illegal immigrants working at Reser’s Fine Foods, the same manufacturer where Cardona-Gonzalez worked. He contacted federal authorities in Kansas and asked them to investigate the employee working there who had stolen his wife’s identity.
The alleged imposter was arrested in August, and her fingerprints confirmed that immigration agents had encountered Cardona-Gonzalez in 1996 in Harlingen, Texas, and sent her back to Mexico.
Cardona-Gonzalez did not respond to a letter sent to her at the Butler County jail, where she is awaiting trial on charges of aggravated identity theft, misuse of a Social Security number and production of a false document.
Her attorney, Matthew Works, did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment. Court filings indicate the two sides are negotiating a plea agreement.
Citing privacy issues, the Social Security Administration declined to discuss the Gutierrez case. Reser’s Fine Foods did not return a message left at its Topeka plant.
Anderson expects more cases of total identity theft “because we all know what is going on out there — which is thousands and thousands of people who are working illegally in the United States under false identities, mostly of US citizens, and very little is being done about it. But we are doing something about it, one case at a time.”
How Congress may use cash transfers as the main weapon in the 2014 elections
January 9, 2013 at 7:32 am | Posted in Arguments For | Comments OffHow Congress may use cash transfers as the main weapon in the 2014 elections
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Going by the Aadhaar event earlier this month in Rajasthan, the Congress Party wants to use cash transfers as a main weapon in the 2014 elections. ET outlines the work ahead to get this going, and the pros and cons of such a strategy.
It was an event by the governments of India and Rajasthan. Yet, everything about the meeting-people, flags, hoardings, public mobilisation-at Dudu village in Rajasthan on October 20 showed it was of the Congress, by the Congress, for the Congress.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi, finance minister P Chidambaram, five other cabinet ministers and Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot helicoptered down to this village on the Jaipur-Alwar highway to tell a 30,000-strong audience about cash transfers and Aadhaar. They delivered a flurry of speeches on the advantages of welfare and subsidy benefits flowing directly into people’s bank accounts.
Then came five videos showing how such cash transfers, based on the unique identity number called Aadhaar, can eliminate middlemen and improve convenience for those accessing their LPG and PDS entitlements, pensions and NREGA wages. Shortly after this, Gehlot announced that soon only those with Aadhaar cards would be able to access state welfare programmes in Rajasthan. Locals say this part of Rajasthan had been seeing an Aadhaar enrolment drive in the 10 days leading up to the event.
And the event seemed choreographed to ensure participation in even greater numbers. As such, that day at Dudu revived a question doing the rounds in Delhi for some time now: is the Congress planning to use cash transfers as a key weapon in the 2014 elections at the Centre? “No doubt about it,” says a Delhi-based political analyst, who did not want to be named. “Look at how Aadhaar is being pushed in Congress-ruled states-that is where they have most of their seats.”
On October 25, the PM also set up a panel-headed by himself, and comprising key ministers and bureaucrats-to coordinate cash transfers. The political analyst says cash transfers is the party’s answer to the anti-corruption movement. “If they can transfer the money, eliminating even half the middlemen, there will be goodwill.” It was goodwill of a similar kind that brought the Congress-led UPA back to power in 2009.
Back then, it came from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which assured 100 days of work in a year to every household. By 2006, the UPA-I coalition had passed this law, along with the Right To Information Act and the Forest Rights Act. Thus, it gave itself three years for these laws to be implemented on the ground, touch people’s lives and translate into votes. Time is running out for the UPA-II , whose term ends in May 2014.
Cash transfers: UIDAI’s newest battle is with finance ministry wing, DFS
January 9, 2013 at 7:31 am | Posted in Problems | Comments OffCash transfers: UIDAI’s newest battle is with finance ministry wing, DFS
In its short life, the Unique Identification Authority of India(UIDAI) has seen its fair share of skirmishes. Its latest skirmish is with an arm of the finance ministry, thedepartment of financial services (DFS), the genesis of which can be traced back to their different models to make payments.
So, when the government transfers money, to avoid duplication, it does so only to Aadhaar-verified accounts. Likewise, for transactions. When a villager wants to, say, withdraw money from her bank account, her fingerprint will be verified on a handheld machine of an agent. That scan will travel for instant verification to the central database.
On verification, the agent gives her the money. The DFS has other ideas. Under its current secretary, DK Mittal, it has been aggressively pursuing its mandate of financial inclusion. A senior official of DFS says, on the condition of anonymity, its thinking is that Aadhaar will take time to reach everyone and that cash transfers can be rolled out without Aadhaar. A senior UIDAI official, who did not want to be named, describes this as a purely “anti-Aadhaar play”.
The DFS plan rides on an architecture created by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which was set up to create a national payment architecture. This National Accounts Clearing House (NACH) can make cash transfers into beneficiary accounts using their IFSC codes and bank account numbers. This system, which is essentially a beefed up version of the Electronic Clearing System (ECS), can handle 10 million transactions a day now and 40 million transactions per day after six months.
Eventually, says M Balakrishnan, chief operating officer of NPCI, the Aadhaar payments bridge will be subsumed into the NACH. “This will give the government flexibility to use either Aadhaar or bank accounts to make payments,” he says. But the story gets complicated as one moves closer to the field. NACH is not Aadhaar-dependent-it doesn’t use Aadhaar to identify the beneficiary’s bank account, but rather uses IFSC codes and bank account numbers.
As such, it is akin to the systems already being followed by the government to make NREGA payments electronically. District administration and panchayat officials send to the state department a list of those who worked on a worksite, their bank account numbers and the amounts to be paid to each of them. The state department, in turn, asks the lead bank to credit the money into the workers’ accounts.
The UIDAI official says the DFS-NPCI model does not close the payment loop. “Aadhaar has created a system where biometric authentication at the last mile also tells us the correct person got the money,” he says.
“In the DFS system, that loop of confirmation-the targeted beneficiary received the money-will not be closed.” Put another way, the UIDAI system uses biometrics to verify twicewhen money is deposited into an account and when money is withdrawn from it. By comparison, the DFS-NPCI model does it only in the second leg, by verifying biometrics with the bank; in the first leg, it relies on bank account number.
DIVISIONS OF A SCHEME
January 9, 2013 at 7:28 am | Posted in Arguments For | Comments Offhttp://www.newslaundry.com/2013/01/divisions-of-a-scheme/
DIVISIONS OF A SCHEME
POSTED BY ANAND VARDHAN | JANUARY 8, 2013 IN CRITICLES, CRITIQUE | 1 COMMENT
“People have called it a gamechanger, a revolutionary idea, etc. But I say it is pure magic… With the Direct Benefits Transfer Scheme (DBTS), money released from Delhi immediately reaches the bank account of the intended beneficiary. It is just like magic.”
- P Chidambaram, Union Finance Minister, inaugurating the 1,000th branch of the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur in Jaipur on December 22, 2012 (The Hindu)
“It (the Direct Cash Benefits Transfer Scheme) is not a single jaadu ki chhadi (magic wand). It is an experiment. The world’s largest experiment in administrative reform.”
- Jairam Ramesh, Union Minister for Rural Development, launching DBTS for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) at Gollaprolu in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh on January 6, 2013 (PTI)
If you were following the Raisina Hill grapevine, you would be tempted to view the “magic” phrase in Ramesh’s statement as a not-so-veiled attack on Chidambaram’s “magical” expectations from the Direct Cash Benefits Transfer Scheme. When Pranab Mukherjee had vacated the finance minister’s chair for his Presidential innings in Rashtrapati Bhawan, the rumour mills were working overtime. You were made privy to the Union Rural Development Minister’s letters, with rumours doing rounds that he was posting his prescriptions for an ailing economy to Janpath as well as 7 Race Course as credentials for his claim on the Finance Ministry. As things stand, he heads the same office while Chidambaram got back the office he had been reportedly yearning for – the Finance Ministry. However, the truth could be more bland, and taking such a dig/swipe may not hold. In context of the Direct Cash Benefits Transfer Scheme, both might be right in their own ways, and the truth may lie somewhere in between.
The complete versions of their statements show that both ministers are votaries of the scheme and echo optimism for the scheme. The only point of departure is in the degree of caution that both plead for the full feasibility of the scheme. While Chidambaram has simply asked for patience to help the scheme realise its full potential, Ramesh has placed his riders as cautionary notes for roadblocks ahead. In an assessment bordering on cautious optimism, Ramesh said: “It is the world’s largest experiment in administrative reform. It has problems on the ground. It will have problems with banks, post offices and online connectivity. We have embarked on this. We will resolve these issues as we go along”.
However, the scheme has not gone down too well with a section of National Advisory Council (NAC) members, civil society activists, agrarian experts, economists and public intellectuals. Their note of dissent has been in the public domain for some time now. The Economic and Political Weekly (January 5, 2013) carries a letter signed by a long list of anti-cash transfer voices. Among other things, the letter says:
We oppose the government’s plan for accelerated mass conversion of welfare schemes to Unique Identification Authority (UID)-driven cash transfers. This plan could cause havoc and massive social exclusion.
An impression has been created that the government is all set to launch UID-enabled cash transfers on a mass scale before the 2014 elections. This is very misleading, and looks like an attempt to make people rush to UID enrolment centres. This announcement also diverts attention from the government’s failure to enact a NFSA. The food security bill, very weak in the first place, has been languishing with a Standing Committee for a whole year. Meanwhile, food stocks are accumulating on an unprecedented scale. The need of the hour is a comprehensive NFSA, not a potentially disruptive rush for UID-driven cash transfers.
(Signed by – M S Swaminathan, Bezwada Wilson, Shantha Sinha, Veena Shatrugna, Aruna Roy, Gautam Mody, Jean Drèze, Bina Agarwal, Utsa Patnaik, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, and 198 others).
The binary seems to have got entrenched in media debates on the issue too, predictably on the lines of pro/anti positions. What has been a serious gap in media discourse on this issue is that it has never attempted to educate the public on the implications, regulations and relative merits and limitations of the scheme beyond the pole positions of for/against polemics.
However, there have been examples of some well-informed opinion pieces which have sought to analyse, and then judge, the issue in multiple perspectives. On New Year’s day, economist Abhijit Banerjee’s piece New Day, New Start (The Hindustan Times, January 1, 2013) was remarkable in this respect. His insights into the merits and potential dangers of the scheme as well as into the motivations and mindsets of its advocates and critics is an example of reflective commentary which could enrich discourse on the issue. To sum up his arguments on either side of the divide, here is a capsule:
Advantages:
1. This to me is one great advantage of Aadhaar. In the end my fingertips and my cornea are mine. No one else will be able to claim that he is me, and I should almost always be able to demonstrate that I am. That means that it is now possible to stop Ram from collecting Raghu’s kerosene, and Raghu not be deprived because his ration card got soaked when the rain came in through the broken roof. Moreover, now that every entitlement can be linked to a single ID, it should be possible to prevent Ram from collecting both subsidised kerosene and LPG cylinders at less than half the market price, given that the law says that no one can have both.
(Like everything else in India, it will not work perfectly. Some will be asked for bribes, though the fact that, unlike in the case of the ration card, they could just go elsewhere to get their number will protect them to some extent.)
Others will be turned away because their fingers don’t print, despite the fact that the Aadhaar rules say that no one can be refused. Sometimes the computers will freeze and the networks will be down, despite all attempts to build in backups. But then the comparison should not be with some ideal system that runs perfectly, but with the extant systems for an ID (a passport or a ration card), which can be infuriating, to say the least.
2. We are told that people do not like cash – they want food and fuel. I have more faith in actual outcomes. The one study that I know of cash versus food, conducted by the Gandhian trade union SEWA in some Delhi slums, found that a move to cash made no difference in people’s cereal consumption but helped them when they had medical emergencies. There was no effect on consumption of alcohol or other “bads”. Moreover out of 100 people who were switched to cash, only four volunteered to go back to food when offered the choice after six months of cash. However this is one small study, with little pretence of being scientific about controlling other factors that might have changed, and we absolutely need to wait for other, better evidence (there is a study in Andhra Pradesh that is about to announce its results)
Limitations and Potential Dangers
1. The point is not to treat it as a done deal, a solution to everything that goes wrong in government transfer programmes. Even with Aadhaar we would need to find a way to stop politicians and bureaucrats from putting their friends on the BPL lists. Is there a way to be creative about verifications that make that harder? At a more mundane level, given that there are bound to be glitches, should we not worry about the current push to start using the Aadhaar infrastructure for real government programmes before it has been field-tested through its uses in getting bank accounts and cell-phones? What is the right way to roll it out?
2. When the Aadhaar infrastructure is in place and working well, which I predict will happen soon enough, would it not become extremely tempting for governments facing elections to start giving away larger and larger sums of money in key constituencies, given that money can be transferred to hundreds of millions of Aadhaar accounts with the press of a button? What stops an explosion of populism?
The Prescription – The Way Ahead
All political parties should agree on a number, some fixed fraction of GDP that can be used for all transfers, cash and non-cash – including the many boondoggles that we offer to the rich. If the government wants to give away more cash, it will have to cut back somewhere else, and perhaps this will persuade it to rein in the more egregious of our transfers to those who don’t need it, such as the subsidy on LPG.
As the state shows some semblance of seriousness in getting its public delivery system in order, media discourse on the issues of welfare schemes, development administration and delivery mechanisms also needs to widen the terms of its engagement with public administration issues. It requires a healthy mix of policy education, assessment and critical inquiry. The year started on one such contribution to the media’s critical landscape. Hope the space expands for engagement with such seminal issues of democratic citizenship.
Gangs faking Aadhaar, credit cards busted
January 9, 2013 at 7:26 am | Posted in Problems | Comments OffGangs faking Aadhaar, credit cards busted
TNN | Jan 8, 2013, 04.18 AM IST
BANGALORE: Three men who manufactured fake identity cards and bank documents have been arrested. The trio allegedly created fake Aadhaar, PAN and voter ID cards, besides demand drafts and cheques at their home.
“The fraud was exposed when they sought to encash a cheque purportedly issued by a family court in Mysore,” said DCP (Central) BR Ravikanthe Gowda.
The arrested were identified as Harish Kumar A alias Harshavardhana, 26, of Sharadadevi Nagar in Mysore, G Shanmugam, 35, of Kodlu Village, Singasandra, off Hosur Road, and Rajashekharan alias Raje Gowda, 53, of KP Agrahara, off Magadi Road.
“The trio faked demand drafts and cheques of ING Vysya Bank, State Bank of Mysore and Bank of Baroda and encashed them. When we raided the premises of Rajashekharan, we found printers, computers and CPUs that were used in making the fake proofs and seals,” said the DCP.
They purchased cars with fake credit cards
Jayanagar police arrested 14 persons and seized 27 fake credit cards which they swiped at malls, electronic shops and other business establishments to make huge purchases. The cards were in the name of two major private Indian banks and a few multinational ones.
“Using these credit cards, the accused purchased a Toyota Innova car, a Mahindra Scorpio, 11 two-wheelers, high-end watches, electronic gadgets like mobile phones and gold jewellery. We are yet to estimate the total worth of goods they have purchased. The kingpin of the racket, Jayakumar, is among the arrested. He had joined hands with another agent Gunashekharan, who brought the fake cards from Malaysia. Gunashekharan is absconding,” said DCP (South) HS Revanna.
He was earlier arrested by Sampigehalli police and was out on bail. He also used to sell fake credit cards for a price
Technology can be used to fight corruption: Nilekani
January 8, 2013 at 4:21 pm | Posted in Arguments For | Comments OffTechnology can be used to fight corruption: Nilekani
UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani. Photo: Manvender Vashist/PTI
Suggestion comes as debate over corruption has been revived thanks to fresh accusations by Arvind Kejriwal
Liz Mathew | Anuja
Updated: Fri, Nov 02 2012. 01 30 AM IST
New Delhi: Technology can be deployed effectively to fight corruption, precluding the need for fresh legislation or oversight bodies such as the Lokpal but this requires a change in mindset, said Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
The suggestion from Nilekani comes as the debate over corruption has been revived thanks to fresh accusations by activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal. In contrast with the civil and political action proposed by Kejriwal and his team, Nilekani suggested the use of technology to ensure that benefits reach their intended targets.
Nilekani classified corruption into three types—large-deal corruption, retail-level corruption and tax evasion.
“When you have a welfare system, it increases the number of touch points between the resident and the state,” Nilekani said while delivering the 19th Lovraj Kumar memorial lecture on “Tackling Corruption-Some Alternative Approaches” on Thursday. “The moment you create a non-choice system of public delivery, the choice rests with the supplier. Is there then a way to use technology to give a choice?” Nilekani asked, referring to the usage of the Aadhar or unique ID card in the supply chain.
Nilekani stressed the need for a new debate on solving the issue of corruption. “There is no silver bullet that will weed out corruption. There cannot be an ad-hoc, knee-jerk reaction to complicated issues of governance,” he said. The late Lovraj Kumar, India’s first Rhodes Scholar, was a civil servant who played a key part in formulating the country’s economic policies between about 1960 and the mid 1980s.
Unconstitutional And Illegal Biometrics Collection Laws And Practices In India
January 8, 2013 at 4:19 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffUnconstitutional And Illegal Biometrics Collection Laws And Practices In India
We have no dedicated Data Protection Laws in India, Data Security Laws in India, Cyber Security Laws in India, etc. Even the Cyber Law of India, incorporated in the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act 2000), is an “Endemic E-Surveillance Enabling Law” that requires urgent “Repeal”.
Rail ID rule is anti-poor
January 8, 2013 at 4:18 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffRail ID rule is anti-poor
The Indian Railways’ decision making it mandatory for all passengers with reserved accommodation on trains to carry valid identity cards is doubtless well-intentioned, as it should help eliminate middlemen and touts who make a killing by blocking train tickets and selling them at a premium. But this regulation, to be effective from December 1, is invidious and, on the face of it, anti-poor.
To ask rail passengers to carry ID cards in a nation in which less than 10 per cent of people possess any such documentation is effectively to discriminate against all those, including the large numbers of migrant labour, who might need to travel at short notice. The problem of fake bookings lies in a nexus between babus who staff the reservation system and touts. The railways should tackle that problem rather than trouble passengers or allow them to be fleeced by checking staff, which is what will almost certainly happen when this regulation comes into force.
At a time when even the issuing of Aadhar cards is at an incipient stage, enforcement of the ID card rule will be another bugbear. Ideally, every Indian, including the poorest, should have a valid ID so that all government benefits can flow to the right recipients rather than see them leak into the wrong hands. To arm each of 1.2 billion Indians with an identity card is, however, a Herculean task that may take many years. Official India needs to recognise the problems that exist before it tries to implement unenforceable rules.
KDMC ‘Corporators’ are issuing Aadhar Cards in Kalyan!
January 8, 2013 at 4:17 pm | Posted in Problems | Comments OffKDMC ‘Corporators’ are issuing Aadhar Cards in Kalyan!
By अजिंक्य भातंब्रेकर | ajinkya.bhatambrekar@jaimaharashtranews.com | 03 Nov Sat, 2012 | Updated 4:30 pm IST
Kalyan: Aadhar card, which is the photo identity proof of your citizenship is being made illegally in Kalyan and Dombivali. Shockingly, Kalyan-Dombivali Municipal Corporation’s (KDMC) corporators are interfering in this whole illegal process. And more shockingly, KDMC deputy commissioner agreed this fact. But he clarified that corporators doesn’t have any right or authority to give the Aadhar card to the citizens.
Our Jai Maharashtra’s reporter got the wind of this shocking matter which was being operated at Kalyan’s Beturkar Pada area. When he went there and inquired about the whole incident, some shocking revelations came out. People, who doesn’t have the adequate proofs of their residential area were being given these Aadhar Cards by merely showing the Corporators’ reference application.
About this incident, our reporter asked a question to KDMC deputy commissioner Ganesh Deshmukh. And Deshmukh agreed that this kind of incidents are happening in that area. But Deshmukh also told that, “corporators are not allowed to authorise such kind of important identity proofs without KDMC’s consent. It is totally illegal.”
That is how Jai Maharashtra revealed all these illegal wrongdoings were done by the KDMC corporators. These corporators are doing these things just to secure their vote bank, which is very sad. But something needs to be done about this as soon as possible.
Number games before NRC update
January 8, 2013 at 4:16 pm | Posted in Arguments For, Process | Comments OffNumber games before NRC update
Pankaj Borthakur, Guwahati (Nov 2): Brushing aside earlier apprehensions, the government has decided to go ahead with issuing the Unique Identification (UID) number to residents in Assam like other states where the exercise has already reached an advanced stage.
The 16-digit number, also called Aadhar, would be given to residents in Assam on the basis of the data compiled in the 2011 Census. The number, however, will not give citizenship status to the holder.
The main objective is to compile a centralized database of all inhabitants in the country. A highly placed official at the state home department said: “The number will not grant citizenship to anybody and so there is no point in delaying the exercise.”
The ministry of home affairs (MHA) is implementing the project through the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) which is headed by former Infosys chief executive officer Nandan Nilekani. It has also opened an office in Guwahati.
The authority had concluded a memorandum of understanding with the state government in 2010 for the project but it has been delayed since it would depend heavily on the Census data.
Digitisation of the data for Assam is yet to be completed by the Census department in New Delhi. Other documents like ration cards, driving licences, bank passbooks and local residence certificates would also be taken into account for issuing the card.
Scanning of eye retinas and finger prints is mandatory in the process of registering under the UID system to prevent duplication of identities. In the Northeast, Tripura and Sikkim are the other states where the project has reached an advanced stage.
“In Assam, the works are being initiated while in Tripura about 90 per cent has already been completed,” said assistant director general of UIDAI, Devajit Khound.
But unlike these two states, the exercise in Assam passed through a phase of indecisiveness and confusion. The authority had initiated preliminary work for data collection in 2010 in Guwahati only to stop it after a few months.
When the scheme was announced by the Centre years ago, it raised concern among the indigenous population and civil society organisations in the state since it was imagined that the Aadhar card would serve as the basis for claiming citizenship.
The opposition has, however, fizzled out after it was known that the aim of the scheme is only to generate data. On the contrary, top officials are of the view that the database would help in detection of alien citizens since they would not be able forge their identities after being given registered.
They added that the database could be an “effective tool” to update the National Register of Citizens which is expected to be started soon in upper Assam.
“But the government must ensure us that no illegal migrant would be able to use the card as an evidence to claim citizenship,” said Aasu adviser Samujjal Kumar Bhatacharyya.
State Aadhaar coverage crosses 80% mark
January 8, 2013 at 4:14 pm | Posted in Process | Comments OffState Aadhaar coverage crosses 80% mark
PANAJI: The Aadhaar card coverage in Goa has crossed 80%, probably the highest in the country. Authorities are hoping to achieve 100% coverage in Goa by December end.
Vijay Saxena, joint director, department of planning, statistics and evaluation, which is the nodal department for Aadhaar project in Goa, said that till date there are 71 stations operating to enroll citizens under Aadhaar all over Goa.
Since August 2011, when the aadhaar project was launched in Goa, 11,85,278 people have been enrolled under Aadhaar. From this, 10,66,750 Aadhaar cards have already been issued.
But Saxena said that when Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), visited Goa on August 30, 2012, he assured to expedite issue of the Aadhaar cards that have not been issued yet. Saxena also referred to the fact that it is essential for citizens to have Aadhaar cards to avail many of the government’s social welfare schemes. “Beneficiaries of such schemes should not panic if they have not received their Aadhaar cards. Till the time they receive the card, the enrollment ID number given on acknowledgment slip will be accepted by the authorities,” Saxena said.
The joint director said that Aadhaar cards that have been issued are already being used by citizens in various ways including opening of bank accounts in nationalized banks. Saxena pointed out that, the chief minister has announced that from April 1, 2013, no benefits of schemes will be released unless Aadhaar numbers are provided by beneficiaries. Importantly, there are no complaints against the already issued Aadhaar cards in Goa.
Saxena said the UIDAI chairman has praised Goa’s success in the Aadhaar project. Nilekani not only appreciated Goa’s high coverage but also praised the quality of enrollment in Goa, due to which rejection is less than 1%. In other states, the rejection is as high as 8%. Saxena said that Nilekani also praised chief minister Manohar Parrikar for showing commitment to making beneficiary-oriented schemes in Goa Aadhaar compliant.
Nilekani’s appreciation of Goa’s initiatives resulted in the UIDAI approving the state’s proposal to make various social welfare schemes Aadhaar compliant. The department of planning, statistics and evaluation had proposed that various Goan schemes like Dayanand Social Security scheme, issue of ration card, issue of birth and death certificate and Griha Laxmi scheme should be made Aadhaar compliant.
The UIDAI has now sanctioned Goa a sum of one crore as part amount for the computerization and integration of Aadhaar numbers into computer databases of various beneficiary-oriented schemes. The total amount to be released is 10 crore.
Asked why Goa could not achieve 100% coverage, Saxena said that the authorities lost almost three months during the Assembly elections. During this time, there were no officials, no premises available to set up enrollment stations and also no vehicles.
The downside of the project is that the two important talukas of Bardez and Salcette have still not reached 70% coverage. “But the department is trying its best to deploy more machines to increase the coverage and achieve 100% coverage by December-end,” Saxena said.
The five talukas with high Aadhaar coverage in Goa are Quepem (89%), Mormugao (83%), Canacona (78%), Bicholim (74%) and Sattari (73%).
Single account for financial services
January 8, 2013 at 4:13 pm | Posted in Arguments For | Comments OffSingle account for financial services
S. M. ROY
The integration of bank, insurance, pension and stock market transactions into a single account is both possible and desirable from a customer’s point of view.
“Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking” — was the quintessential philosophy of a piscean, who crossed the river of life in the recent past.
The key to Steve Job’s success was the relentless pursuit of ‘what is better for the customer’ even before they knew that they needed it! Applying this analogy to the financial services sector, we present some thoughts on making life simpler for the end users, that is, the public.
The starting point for this thought process was a credit card statement, reflecting spending in three different foreign currencies. It unambiguously reflected the foreign currency, the amounts spent in each foreign currency and the rupee equivalent.
This leads to an intriguing thought: If technology can capture transactions in multiple currencies in a single statement, what prevents it from capturing transactions and holding of shares as well in the same account?
In other words, why have a separate demat account when, with suitable upgradation of the core banking system, the existing bank account itself could, perhaps, do the job.
Before elaborating on this thought, a minor digression would be in order. A scaffolding is required for construction of a building, but it is dismantled once the construction is complete.
Similarly, without the demat system — the single-most important reform in securities market in India — securities markets would not have taken off to its present levels.
AADHAR-BASED INTEGRATION
But now, the time has come to reconsider the relevance of a standalone demat and instead move to an integrated system, wherein bank details and demat details are reflected in a single account.
The above concept could be extended to cover the entire spectrum of financial assets. At present, different financial assets are captured in separate silos, namely, banks account, demat account, pension fund account, insurance policies, and so on, reflecting the compartmentalised approach of the sectoral service providers.
Obviously, from a user’s perspective, this is not the most convenient option. If the customer’s interest is placed at the forefront, then consolidation of all financial assets in one account is the logical way forward.
Accordingly, we propose a single account, say financial account (for want of better term) that would reflect the holding and transaction in all financial assets.
The UID or ‘Aadhar’ number itself could be the account number for this omnibus account. This account should capture basic banking details.
A person may choose to have savings account with Bank A, based on proximity, and choose to place a fixed deposit with Bank B, offering a higher rate of interest. The proposed single account should capture his/her transactions and holding in both these banks.
Investment in government small-savings schemes such as NSC, PPF, and postal savings schemes should be reflected in this account. It should capture and reflect details of investment in securities, including that in e-commodities.
This would eliminate the need for separate demat account for investing in e-commodities, through commodities spot exchange.
The proposed account should also provide details of life insurance policy, say, with Company A and also the vehicle insurance policy with Company B. The reported proposal by IRDA to have ‘repositories’ to hold insurance policies in electronic form, is a typically compartmentalised approach of a sectoral regulator. The details of pension and provident fund subscriptions should also be captured in the proposed account, including that of the New Pension System (NPS). This will eliminate the need for a separate, permanent pension account number (PPAN) number envisaged for NPS.
On the liability side, the proposed account should reflect all types of liabilities, including credit cards, consumer loans, housing loan, loan against insurance policy etc. across service providers.
EXAGGERATED PROBLEMS
The benefits of the proposed convergence would be immense, apart from just convenience. There would be just one KYC for entire financial services sector which would provide a huge boost to the financial inclusion drive of the Government.
In remote areas, innovations like business correspondents, operating with handheld devices, are facilitating financial inclusion.
Progressive service providers/NGOs have supplemented these efforts by introducing ‘non-basic’ financial assets like micro insurance, micro pension, micro money market mutual funds and micro index mutual funds in unbanked areas.
Needless to say, these first-time investors would find it easier to manage/monitor one singe account than multiple accounts.
Implementing this proposal would need the combined initiative and effort of both the state and the financial service providers. The Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (FSLRC), which is working on harmonising legislations across sectors, can, if required, recommend a suitable legal framework that will enable the proposed convergence.
Co-operation and co-ordination between regulators and the service providers would be a pre requisite for implementation.
THE IT ANALOGY
Plenty of technical and technological hurdles would arise during implementation, including hurdles that are imaginary and drummed up by vested interests.
However, the real hurdles that emerge would not be insurmountable. Keeping customer’s interest in the forefront, this complex task of convergence needs to be undertaken, just as what Steve Jobs did in IT.
Upon implementation, a single financial account would become the norm, just as Graphic User Interface (GUI) is the norm in personal computing.
Users of a single financial account would simply not remember how it was before, just as today’s generation view with horror the syntax-driven precursor to GUI, namely, the Disk Operating System.
Are we then ready to be free of dogma?
(The author works with a financial services industry. The views are personal.)
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