12 December,2010 12:38 AM IST | | Paromita Vohra
Some months ago, a small news item said Tochi Raina, singer of O Pardesi in the film Dev D, had been hospitalised for depression. After a website wrongly credited a singer with a similar name (Toshi Sabri) for the song, stage shows meant for Tochi, all went to Toshi, driving Tochi to despair. People from Shakespeare to David Dhawan have turned such things to comedy, but it is possible too to see the bleak and Kafkaesque loss of self in this tale.
Identity is fragile, entangled as it is with the acknowledgement ufffd and prejudice ufffd of others. The smallest error or misjudgement can leave us helpless nightmare dancers on quicksand. In the fraught business of citizenship, it is a loaded thing, impacting our freedom, mobility, food and health care.
The Unique Identification (UID) project is presented as a sunny solution to the nightmare of access to the Indian social benefit system. Though the Bill states that it does not relate to benefits and services, the spin, symbolised by the wholesome image of Nandan Nilenkani, is that it will end the deprivation of the poor. It is a value-free number that will set the world right. The spin does not address concerns raised by citizen's groups ufffd only the first of which is the absence of a feasibility study.
The UID will supposedly end the travails of proof for the poor, eternally migrant and perpetually without suitable evidence of need, by using not property and paper to verify identity, but biometrics.
As has been pointed out, while we may all be the same in having bodies, all bodies are not the same. The poor are likely to have seriously calloused hands and malnourishment related cataracts, making fingerprints and iris scans unreliable. In this case, the UIDA will use DNA profiles, and soon DNA profiles may be included in the proposed expandable list of data.
This information about all citizens will be 'networked' with 21 databases including the census as also, the Home Ministry's National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID). NATGRID can share this with various agencies including RAW and IB who are exempt from supervision and the RTI Act. Data can also be shared with any officer above the position of Joint Secretary in the "interest of national security." While any individual who steals or gives this information is liable to prosecution by the harmed party, the UDAI itself is exempt from such prosecution. What does all this have to do with helping the poor?
Many will dismiss unease as the gibberings of conspiracy theorists. Let's grant them 10 per cent. But those who feel the government is a benign parent should feel as sanguine as the girl whose parents arrange her marriage to a man acquitted of murder because he comes from a respected family ufffd after all, they have her best interests at heart, no?
In a country without strong privacy laws, where young teen Muslim boys are 'mistakenly' imprisoned and tortured after blasts and riots, and corporates flock avidly around this project ufffd Accenture, already involved in US Homeland Security projects and Visa, who wants to give credit to the poor (interest free, right?) ufffdthis is something every citizen needs to think about hard. This is a project still in process, and public opinion can modify the project and make it more accountable. So you should consider informing yourself through UID-critical blogs and the UIDIA website ufffd then clicking that comment button.
The result of surveillance is supposed to be security ufffd most often this means conformism. The worst it can do, we've seen trailers of: unjust, intolerant and violent persecution of dissent or protest. The movie, we don't need to see.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company. Reach her at www.parodevi.com. The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't necessarily represent those of the paper.
