News and updates about the Aadhaar project by the UIDAI.
Children spotted a bag with a lot of Aadhaar cards at a scrap dealer’s shop in Jaipur, and informed the local councillor, reports DNA. Upon investigating, it was found that an unidentified man had sold them to the scrap dealer (for the weight of the paper they were printed on!). Read more…
The official Aadhaar enrolment software requires the Aadhaar operator to authenticate using iris scans as well as fingerprints. Huffington Post has reported an enrolment scam in Maharashtra, where Aadhaar enrolment officer, Mangesh Sitaram Bhalerao provided people who worked under him with rubber stamp copies of his thumbprint. These rubber stamp fingerprints Read more…
India Post website appears to have added the option to de-link Aadhaar to their form for Aadhaar linking. This is actually a requirement for AUAs and KUAs according to the rules, which is being ignored in the push for linking Aadhaar with everything, as we pointed out in the post Read more…
The Privacy Policy page on the UIDAI website claims to not use cookies. This is their section on use of cookies: Cookies A cookie is a piece of software code that an Internet website sends to your browser when you access information in that site. This site does not use Read more…
The Direct Benefit Transfer pilot for the Public Distribution system in Ranchi's Nagri block in Jharkhand resulted in widespread exclusion and denial of food to some of the most needy in the state, as reported by the Right To Food Campaign in February this year. Aadhaar's ghosts, that the government Read more…
In October 2017, the RBI announced a high level task force that would study and help set up a transparent and comprehensive public credit registry (PCR). The RBI's PCR was intended to be "an extensive database of credit information for India that is accessible to all stakeholders". The PCR was intended to help improve efficiencies in the Indian credit market, aid financial inclusion, help control deliquencies and in general improve the ease of doing business. (more…)
The Lokniti Foundation is a secretive organisation with no website, no presence on social media, and no public list of trustees. Their registered office is a sealed building in south Delhi's outskirts. According to its brochure, it is a non-profit established "with the primary objective to improve the quality of Read more…
(Concern raised in this tweet by data security researcher Srinivas Kodali) In its Regional Conference on Child Marriage held in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, earlier this year, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) brought out recommendations for implementation by various state governments "so that the menace of child marriage is curbed and Read more…
Frequent warnings by banks and police are apparently not the solution to combating debit/credit card fraud. The Hindu reports that Cyber Cell officials in Kerala's Kozhikode district are discovering three new cases every month on average. The victims are usually educated middle-class families or the elderly, and many are yet Read more…
The Supreme Court's Constitution Bench grilled the government's lawyers on Aadhaar's potential to prevent bank fraud, reports The Economic Times. During the ongoing hearings to determine the Constitutional validity of Aadhaar, the Bench countered the government's claim that linking the unique identification number with bank accounts had helped curb black Read more…