DOUBLE STANDARDS OF THE UPPER CRUST
The design to keep the poor and the less privileged perpetually deprived in the name of privacy has reflections of the "land is your mother, just don't part with it" campaign of the well-heeled and the self-styled champions of the poor. Now, they have raised the issue of privacy in Aadhar enrolments. Aadhar is the largest ever registration of citizens in the history of mankind. All developed countries have done it. India is doing it now. But the elite, mostly leftist, columnists have an issue with it. It violates privacy! As if Google and Facebook didn't already know everything about you. And they are professing this to the poor and needy, who must necessarily enrol for a leak-proof, fool-proof biometric identification system with near ironclad security.
Is an average citizen, leave alone the starving poor, really worried about his retinal scan records being leaked to the CIA, to RAW or even to the ISI? Is giving out one’s residential address or the mobile number to the government a step towards enslavement? The government has it anyway in its different records. Does the biometric records of a citizen make him easier to conscript? What privacy are we talking about?
The government has been able to successfully plug the loopholes of Direct Benefit Transfer in transferring thousands of crores to nearly ten crore families. Aadhar identification, with its biometric security has been instrumental in enabling seventeen crore bank accounts of people, who had no other means to prove their credentials. The Aadhar identification has also enabled a one-rupee a month insurance for crores of poor and medical insurance for the masses at a mere ninety paisa a day.
It is surprising that this useful exercise of creating a national register is being stonewalled repeatedly by the judiciary. The elite thinkers have a big problem with this. They do not tire of telling the poor that their privacy is being invaded by the demon that is government. The same proponents of privacy and defenders of individual freedom have no qualms in getting fingerprinted for their passports and American visa. They will line up before a Western Embassy at midnight to be biometrically registered, an unavoidable requirement for their next flight to salvation. But the poor must resist biometric scanning even if they starve to death. After all with all the misery gone, the raison d'etre of the chatterati is in danger. No underdogs no NGOs, no Seminars and no international lecture circuits. It will be a sad day for them, when the poor are no more poor.
The design to keep the poor and the less privileged perpetually deprived in the name of privacy has reflections of the "land is your mother, just don't part with it" campaign of the well-heeled and the self-styled champions of the poor. Now, they have raised the issue of privacy in Aadhar enrolments. Aadhar is the largest ever registration of citizens in the history of mankind. All developed countries have done it. India is doing it now. But the elite, mostly leftist, columnists have an issue with it. It violates privacy! As if Google and Facebook didn't already know everything about you. And they are professing this to the poor and needy, who must necessarily enrol for a leak-proof, fool-proof biometric identification system with near ironclad security.
Is an average citizen, leave alone the starving poor, really worried about his retinal scan records being leaked to the CIA, to RAW or even to the ISI? Is giving out one’s residential address or the mobile number to the government a step towards enslavement? The government has it anyway in its different records. Does the biometric records of a citizen make him easier to conscript? What privacy are we talking about?
The government has been able to successfully plug the loopholes of Direct Benefit Transfer in transferring thousands of crores to nearly ten crore families. Aadhar identification, with its biometric security has been instrumental in enabling seventeen crore bank accounts of people, who had no other means to prove their credentials. The Aadhar identification has also enabled a one-rupee a month insurance for crores of poor and medical insurance for the masses at a mere ninety paisa a day.
It is surprising that this useful exercise of creating a national register is being stonewalled repeatedly by the judiciary. The elite thinkers have a big problem with this. They do not tire of telling the poor that their privacy is being invaded by the demon that is government. The same proponents of privacy and defenders of individual freedom have no qualms in getting fingerprinted for their passports and American visa. They will line up before a Western Embassy at midnight to be biometrically registered, an unavoidable requirement for their next flight to salvation. But the poor must resist biometric scanning even if they starve to death. After all with all the misery gone, the raison d'etre of the chatterati is in danger. No underdogs no NGOs, no Seminars and no international lecture circuits. It will be a sad day for them, when the poor are no more poor.
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