 I think most of us know the debates around the UID project and most of us have watched the kind of proliferation of this everywhere. So, just in capsule I thought I will start with the issues around this and then go on to what we need to discuss now because most of us are lacking in an understanding of where all this is headed. In fact, most of us are unaware too about where we are now. So, we will just take a look at it. I think one of the lessons we have had is that post-mortem work is not enough in this field. We have to do a certain amount of crystal ball gazing and try and understand where we are headed so that we can contribute in terms of public discussion to what this is about because it affects everybody. It affects when I say everybody is actually much wider, we have not realized how wide this is. It affects everybody in this country that we know. It also affects people in other countries and the Africa and Latin America for instance are completely overrun by projects like this. We are also aware that the world bank has a direct interest in this project and that is in pushing this project to be adopted in many parts of the world. Their motivation, their incentive, the reason for their being so enthusiastic about this is not immediately plain except that in one of the meetings which Mr. Nilakani had in the World Bank, after he had explained what this project was, the president of the World Bank with a great deal of excitement in his voice turned on and asked him. So, what you are saying is that if there is a woman in Nairobi who is at an ATM and she is at the ATM in Nairobi and I am here in Washington and I can sit here and know that she is at that ATM and that she is operating that ATM. I may not know what she is using it for but I will know that she is there at this point. Is that possible? And the answer of course was yes it is possible. So, there is a kind of a great deal of excitement about being able to track and see people at in real time and see where they are and the kind of activities that people are involved in. So, the World Bank has had that kind of interest and we also know that the World Bank has made it part of the conditions for their giving loans to say that if you know the national ID project has to be part of their part of any loan that they give. So, you have to have an ID project along with it. We also know now that in many of those countries there has been no local tests being done of the biometrics. They do not at least civil society they does not seem to be aware that there is any report that has come out on biometrics. We know that in India we have had some reports on biometrics and many of these some of these countries already have national ID. They are being converted into biometrically enabled identity project, national ID project. We know that in India we have had a few reports and those reports have shown that the reports which are there which were produced by UIDAI show that it is not you know it is not wholly reliable that there could be problems with it. Singaporean could have its own set of problems. We know that the iris continues to be expensive and it is not something that has you know that is everywhere and that too comes with its set of problems. We also know that the RBI therefore was you know thinking in terms of facial recognition rather than use these because presumably you can identify a phase better than you can otherwise. But we know that facial recognition technology is very very new. So, it seems like the idea of testing biometrics on large population clusters see that seems to be the continuing trend. It is not like these are perfected or you know near perfected technologies which are being you know which are being rolled out. But these are technologies which are all in experimental stages and we are all guinea pig for that. What we are also seeing is that it is this kind of guinea pig treatment of population is not happening only in relation to biometrics. It is also happening in relation to many other projects and we will you know we need to talk a little bit about what innovation means, why rules are a bother for innovation. So, we will discuss some of that and if I do not do it just remind me that we need to do it. But if you were to look at the if we were to look at some of the major you know major ways in which we have been taught to think about it. So, that we can start the crystal ball gazing after that. The first set of words that helped us understand this and even I have said it many times and others have said it too. The three words were unique ubiquitous and universal. We have seen how this rolls out. So, when they said unique many of us thought and I know I did that this was about the uniqueness of biometrics. But it was over time we realized it is not the uniqueness of biometrics that we are talking about. It is I being able to identify every individual uniquely with a number. So, biometrics may or may not work, but that number is important. We also know that in that unique identification of a person the UID number alone is not enough and that there is a greater amount of data that has been seen to be necessary, which is why we have what we call the next three set of things, which is the jam trinity. So, you will find that even in the national health stack documents one of the prominent parts of that is this thing called the jam trinity, which is Jandan Aadhar mobile. And since 2010 at least we have been told that Roti Kapada or Makhan is now passe, it is these three numbers that are going to be vital, which is why we find that throughout the enrolling out of this project we have been told give your mobile phone number, give your bank account number, link it. If you look at the latest amendment that has come to the Aadhar act, the Supreme Court has said you cannot ask for it to be used in banks, you cannot ask for it to be under the law that was there, they said you cannot ask for it to be used in banks or for mobile phone. So, now they have brought a new law to say that it is not under that law which was a money bill, but we are asking for it by a separate law. The Supreme Court has upheld the use of Aadhar, now we are going to bring in the bank and the mobile phone. The urgency with which this has been brought tells us the significance of the Jandan Aadhar mobile trinity. So, there are multiple trinities of this kind that we find as we go along. So, in understanding where we locate this and how we view this, one of the ways of looking at it is they starting with digitization, where and I am just telling you some of the ways in which we have learned to think about it, I am sure there are multiple other ways, but we have to learn how to understand what is happening in the world around us. So, this is just an attempt to do that. The first thing was digitization. So, you start with digitization which for many people seemed like a good idea, because it will streamline things, it will not be in multiple registers, it will not go into tatters, it will be possible to check immediately. So, digitization per se did not seem like a bad thing, except that nobody thought about it in a context where it was you know where the plan was that you start with digitization, but you are not going to end with it. There are many other steps before you finally, before they finally arrive at where they want to arrive. Just one diversion here that some of us believe that it is not only that we do not know where all this is headed, but those who are pushing the project here, they might I do not know if there are some hidden people who know where all this is headed, but I think the way we understand it is even those who are promoting the project here and promoting many of these ways of looking at data, even they do not seem to have a clear idea of all the things that will be done and all the directions in which this will go. There are certain things that have been identified for instance, FinTech companies and financial you know going down the financial route is pretty clear. Entering children's lives and trying to track the whole thing from birth to you know from before birth to beyond death, that kind of ambition to be able to track people that much we can see. We can see that they are looking in health, in education and in the context of poverty. One of the reasons we worry so much when it comes to poverty is we are seeing clear signs that there are you know the there are three terms that became important for us again and other committee were not produced by the proponents of the project, but it has emerged from among many of us who work in the field that these three are going to become very significant. One is redundancy. It means the redundancy of people to system. The second is dispensability, that there are many classes and kinds of populations who are dispensable to the kind of you know to the new order that is emerging. And the third is invisibilizing that you know this is something that I think the mass displacement movement would use. How systematically there is a way in which people get invisibilized and so you do not see them at all and therefore their problem does not exist. And after some time they become irrelevant to the whole planning and response process. So, these three are serious concerns for many of us and we worry that this is what this is the direction in which some of this is headed. That is the projects and the ambitions and the aspirations of this project may result. In fact, we are already seeing it happen. One of the ways in which we are seeing it happen very sharply is when we talk about exclusion. It is not just about people getting excluded. So, even when it reaches salvation deaths and it becomes clear that you know people are dying because they are not able to use their UID number or they are not able to link it or their biometrics do not work. They are not able to enroll. If it is any of these and you say that there are deaths, increasingly we are beginning to hear from various people who support the project that you know it after all people die anyway. People were dying even before. So, the idea that the new project is only killing as many people as an earlier you know as it was before this is a chilling thing to hear from anybody and so these are the kind of context that we are seeing. So, the first part of it where it was digitization, there was very little resistance to it actually. The only time I think there was some anxiety was when which came from the railway union when computerization was introduced into you know into the indicating process. But when digitization started of all the records that the government holds, there was very little resistance and nobody saw any reason to resist it. After that you find that it moves very quickly into the ID system and in the so if there is a kind of progression that we are seeing, we feel it is important to acknowledge the progression because we need to see if in our understanding there are maybe other routes to this progression and also to see where it could lead. Because we have to learn how to think about this into the future, we cannot be looking back the whole time, we look back so that we able to look at the future. So, the next major step that we see of course the next major step really was e-governance. The idea that everything should be done through e-governance and there is a book called the silent state which gives us a you know in just a paragraph it tells us how after the dot com bus, the European Union decided that you know the technology companies were having a low run and therefore, the European Union was saying that we are going to you know let us help the technology companies because otherwise they will sink and they will be able to help us. So, it is a quid pro quo between the two and on its own it is not a problem that a government is going to help companies that are sinking. If it is possible that those companies will be able to produce something that is useful to administration to people, but you see the closeness between closeness of aspirations between a government and business interest emerging during that time and then you find that there are there is this whole idea of biometric ideas that comes in. It is not only in the developing world that they thought of this. In the UK for instance, we know that there was a project that they started, but very quickly they realized that these were projects this kind of project would result in serious civil liberties violations to people. Their concern was not about exclusion of people. They were more concerned that it would be a civil liberty violation and also questions of cost, questions of you know how good such data would be and what implications it would have for people. So, this and there was a whole ID project that the LSE took up which helped in systematically identifying what all the all the issues were in this and ultimately it resulted in this trapping the project in 2010. The US also thought about it because after 9-11 you find that the UN the United Nations also starts getting into this into this panic mode where they feel that they have to do things in terms of terror. So, 9-11 becomes like a point after which the UN too becomes a panic-stricken reactor. So, they have these you know they bring in these things like money laundering, how money will move. So, it is all about terror funding and we find that what the rules that were made for terror funding saying that you can only move money across in a certain way, you cannot give money to people, it has to be through banks. These were then converted in India for instance into both it had to do with you know what the UN was saying, but it was also used to say for money laundering and then imposing conditions on everybody, but initially it is important that in India we said that when it is no frills accounts and it is poor people they do not need to go through this whole KYC you know rigmarole, because it is small amounts of money and you want people to be able to access the system, this could prevent them from accessing the system. You find when the UID system comes in they say no no no now we are not going to do no frills accounts without any KYC. Now, the KYC when that can be a KYC you bring the KYC which is the UID. So, the linking up of the bank account and of the UID number begins to happen with that. So, even if it is not necessary for the banking system because the poor in any case are only going to access and feed small amounts of them and small transactions, it became important for the UID to have it because they needed to link each other. We see that emerging and we find that in the next step they start talking about the ID system and it becomes a biometric ID system in India too. So, in the US when they did it the well on the UN for a moment they have started talking about the about an ID system national ID system and the there is a funny kind of conflation that happened to be one of the human rights that we have is a right to identity, but that has now been reduced to being reflected in an identity system and at best to having an ID card. So, this idea of identity has got so distorted and then you look at who are the people who are funding this whole exercise and I know that one is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the other is OMEDR and the third is the Australian government. So, it will also be interesting to see what the interest of each of these agencies is because they must be why they think this is worth putting all their money on. So, in the ID systems have the biometric ID system comes in at a time when and this I think we need to do some self reflection on this and how we do how we reflect how we speak about how we publicly debate our own concerns at least in part and this is a I am mooting this that at least in part it was possible for such systems to come in because of the way corruption became the most important violation of human rights in this country for a long time. I do not think there is any denying that corruption is a problem in this country. So, no and the RTI movement was a very important movement where the idea was that we will make the state answerable to a people, but it seems to me and this is just the way I am thinking about it that the idea of transparency and accountability did not get sufficiently developed even by us. So, transparency started taking a life of its own and accountability a life of its own and therefore, everyone being and everyone in everything being transparent seems to have become a normal way of thinking about it. So, long as the state was not telling us that I am going to make you transparent, till then I do not think we realized what the implications of this kind of unbridled transparency was and we find that when this project started and it is an important fact that persons from within the RTI movement also had a problem with the kind of transparency that this project was giving to us. We also see that this is you know that the corruption debate has so overtaken many other things that there are many other things that have lost public space. Even the right to food has had to be you know become subservient in a sense. We are talking about the NREGA now and we are always talking about an ID project that goes with it. So, everything has become subservient to this idea of being able to identify yourself to the state and that is a very significant issue that happened and I do not think as the people who worked in many of these issues, we have learned to re-articulate what our concerns are. We have learned to articulate our concerns about the project, but we have not I do not think we have yet acquired the language in which to re-articulate how we envision this problem of corruption and why this is not a this is not an answer, but a problem of the story. So, in finding the ID system we also know that in India we had you know we have we have had cases sorry I just missed the US again. So, in the US the Bush administration thought of bringing in the real ID, they had a real ID project they even had a real ID act, but they did not really go ahead with it because that as a biometric system when they did their study their national academy found that their national institute of standards and technology found that biometrics are not entirely reliable and in the report that they produced in 2010 you find that they say that you know fingerprints iris all these things are okay, but they are not going to be across populations and across time they are not going to be very helpful. So, they were actually talking about looking at brain waves and all that. So, and you have Ellen Musk recently talking about how the neural system is going to get linked up with the computer. Earlier at least this used to be talked about in a way where they said that you know persons with disability will be able to use it and therefore they will be able to communicate without having like an like a facility for persons with disability we find that very quickly it just transfers itself to whole populations who might find themselves being depending upon the viability of this and how much they are able to try for it to get become a proliferated technology. And in these years the other interesting part of this is that the idea of DNA as an identifier not only in criminal situations, but generally as an identifier and various kinds of things that can be done through DNA and you know that being talked about we see that has also grown around the world. So, we find for instance that on DNA they are talking about in medicine in health for instance in health system you talk earlier about treatment when you get ill you get treated then it went to preventive. So, the idea that you know if you have clean water is that kind of preventive, but then preventive became vaccine and there are you know there are debates and the problem with debates around vaccines. Now, they are talking about predictive medicine and the idea about predictive medicine is that we do not even let a person fall ill we will be able to you know identify and catch it much before. So, for instance they will you know at least just as a joke we often say that now when two people want to get married they will not go to an astrologer to see their horoscope, but they will get a DNA test. So, that will say you know whether what will happen for a few generations then that is fine. We are finding that this idea of DNA as something that is that should be used for predictive medicine also means carries with it the danger that already in many countries and India is a classic example where health budgets are so low 50 percent of that will end up going to and that is what they had asked for actually in the 11th plan. One of those study documents in one of the recent lead up to the plan document it asked to 50 percent to be used for predictive medicine. So, you have DNA everywhere and you will be able to see whether you know I will get breast cancer or not and I will be able to remove well in advance and then if you have a propensity for diabetes then there will be something that will be done in advance. And there are two people who one sociologist and a scientist who you know geneticist the Rose, Stephen Rose and Hillary Rose who in one of their interviews they have written a very interesting book and one of the interviews around that when they were saying talking about genetics and how it will be used for predictive medicine and where you need to locate the gene and they said you know people are looking for the gene that produces obesity in America actually it is in McDonald's they are looking somewhere else they are not going to get it. So, but this idea that everything can be suited to fit various purposes this is also part of our climate. So, when we are thinking about these technologies and the way these technologies are emerging we need to keep that to in mind. So, in the ID system when we brought it in India we know that at least three companies have been involved in it at different stages. The first was the CCS in 1999 2000 when they were asked after the Kargil war to explain what could be done what to be the cause what to be the you know dynamics of doing an ID project they did it for the government and for the home ministry they also did it for the state of Gujarat and we have the state of Gujarat report and it is actually quite fascinating because at the time so the person they introduce biometrics to the part of this ID system and they also introduce the idea that this will be used not only for public services but for private and commercial branches. So, different entities should be able to use it. Now, if there is a resource it will be used. So, the question is whether a person's ID can be treated as such a resource and that has become an administrative and a you know and a system related question and not a political question at all and that is been one of our problems because we need to understand what it means as political beings to have our ID structured in this kind of case. The then we had in the Vipro you know Vipro coming in and they did their task in 2006 and that actually forms the basis of the ID project that ultimately ends and then we have Mr. Nilakani coming in that was not the company but he has since set in place many systems and gone back to enforces and therefore, there is some kind of connectedness that we cannot but now in this is the you know this is where the ID systems are going. The ID system did not stop to the ID at all like I said first of all the ID could not stand on its own and therefore, they needed the JAMP trinity and the JAMP trinity can only operate together which means that if you do not have a mobile phone or you do not have a bank account it is a problem because you have to be able and they are looking at you know various factors of authentication. One of the early NIUs which was set up was the national payments corporation of India and Mr. Nilakani and his people were also part of that you know where they were advisors to the national payments corporation of India to see how they could integrate the UID into the NPCI system. So, these are all connected projects and they are not single standalone projects and startups of various time. So, we need to understand what these connectivity means. The other part of this the next part that you see is that in this connectedness we also have multiple databases as having been created in these databases. So, you find that every place where it is possible to locate the ID you have notifications or instructions or threats saying that you must open your ID inside and what does that mean? I mean that is it is an indication for us about people are not just asking us to do it because they are bored there is a logic to why they are asking us to do it and why there is a compulsion in the way in which they are asking so, there is that compulsion takes me to the next thing that one minute come in come in no no you have to come in some come you can do so, the next thing that they therefore need to you know need to apply your mind to why this number in every database and there are some answers that are emerging in this one. We also need to see at this point that there are multiple ways in which this project is being worked out because the project now is not just the ID project. The project starts with digitization it goes to creating an ID system it goes on after that to putting it in multiple databases and this project is enforced through state coercive. So, there is a there is a very interesting relationship that we see therefore between the state and various possibilities of use of this kind of these kinds of systems and those among the many uses one of the really important one is the way in which the private sector is getting involved in this. So, we throw it back a little bit we go to the 2011 TAGA report we see that the the way in which this is being talked about is to say that government cannot handle data give it to private company we find GSTN is a private company. So, today we find that the income tax department says that you all put your UID number and give it to us GSTN has UID number everywhere and now we are going to share our data with the GSTN. So, a government department will now share the data with a private company how do they allow themselves to do this and where do they get that power from if. So, the question that has been asked kind of in different places that is asked rhetorically and not seriously enough is whose data is and the answers have come in various forms and I think we need to discuss a little bit about what we want the answer to be what it is for each of us. So, there are some who there is a American Senator for instance who says that you know Google and Amazon and all these people they have so much of our data and they are monetizing that data. So, we should pass a law which will make them pay each person whatever may be 25 dollars 50 dollars they say why should they make all that money let them pay to all the hundreds you know billions of users that they have and they should be make to pay. But what that does and that you know people who are contesting that idea are saying that what that does is to say that it is alright to treat that data as property which can be transacted on and ultimately each individual may get a you know a little bit of one personal information is not cannot be converted into property it is a person's right. Identity in fact is being sold which the UN should never be agreeing to identity is being sold when you say that you can take my data over and do what you want. So, that is the it is a it is a debate that we are not having which we desperately need to have. We also know that private companies came into it with a different point we have seen it in 2011 versus SAGA report in 2012 there was a policy document that was put out on data sharing which was put out by the government and the government says that you know different departments have various kinds of. Each of those departments owns that it is their property now they have by a by a policy document actually taken over property rights in all our data and that I mean if I am a lawyer and I cannot see how that can ever be sustained. In fact, a policy is a non-justiceable document it is not a law and you cannot just by a statement of the executive say that I am converting your life into my right it is not even possible, but it has been done and we have not recognized it and therefore our responses are not just not being strong they just have not existed. So, we need to learn to recognize some of these and we will have to figure out what we want to do with each of these. In the midst of all of this we find that there is a resurgence of talk about AI artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence is actually something that everybody knows something about and nobody knows much about. So, but the interesting thing that people like you know some of us always here find is that when we were young they were talking artificial intelligence robots were the big thing and that you know Issa Kasumov and Irobo were the greatest list of literature that we had read and contributes to be the best bit of literature I have written science fiction and so we find that this idea that intelligence from various places can be taken and converted into something else which can then supposedly service humanity. So, long as there are certain basic rules that are built into that intelligence is the way in which this was projected for you, but why is it that between the time I was a young person I mean really young to my being really old there was been very little talk about AI and there is a huge you know resurgence of talk about AI today and we find that that perhaps happened. So, one of the ways of thinking about this is that this is actually managed to find a way by which personal data can be harmed and made it possible now to gather all this data because earlier till you did not have any system by which they all all our records were held in different silos many most of them were held in any case and you know in registers and I just got a you know we got a government document two days ago and I had neatly written it out in fact you know printed it out and the address and the address wrongly digitized. So, now we have a system where the where the registration of your ID will not reflect you, but you have to adopt what the registration reflects because it is not about you. We have another affinity that has emerged during this period and that has to do with this financial revolution that they are looking to do through this thing tech company and the three words in that are cashless, paperless and presence. So, it become irrelevant now where you are who you are what you look like it does not matter at all what they need is that once it is cashless we do not need to see you it does not matter who you are it does not matter what you need it does not matter nothing matter because your presence live. How does this idea of presence live become possible it becomes possible because they put in place system which do not require your presence. So, you have e sign you have e k y c you have d g lockers you have consent architecture none of which requires your presence it only requires an indication that whatever that idea is that is being transacted on that idea is reflected somewhere it does not matter who you are and why is this so important and how is it linked up with something like artificial intelligence. Now, Mr. Nilakini gave us a hint of that when in one of the economic times interviews he told us that this is about trickle up trickle up is where all of us many of us may not have anything to give to the market, but all of us have something that can become the economy. So, all which is data personal data all this data has to trickle up and then it will be converted into the economy. You find that in the Sri Krishna committee report not the bill, but the report are to be saying that I mean very early in the in the report they say that you see by the time the Sri Krishna committee report if you remember was constituted because the attorney general had gone to court and said that there is no there is no right to privacy and the court was hearing the case on privacy when the court was hearing the case the court was seemed to be inclined to say that privacy is a right of the people. That time you had the government go in and say anyway we are setting up a committee you know they are going to look at data protection. So, you do not have to worry about it. So, the court instead of not giving a judgment they gave a judgment, but they also said that the government has said that they are setting up this committee. So, they will come up with data protection principles. So, this came at a time when the government and industry and the UIDAI and people like Vidhi legal center were working very hard to say that people do not have a right to privacy and when that got defeated in the court the next step that they did therefore was in the Sri Krishna committee report to introduce an idea where they said that you know actually you do not you all have a right to privacy of course they could not say after nine judges said that we did they cannot say we do not have it. But they said you all have a right to privacy, but this right to privacy you know why you have it so that you can contribute to the common good and this is part of contributing to the common good and if you look at it the whole thing is about how you are going to create an economy. One way of reading this report and it will be useful for us to see there are other ways of reading this report is to see this report as being a way being a means to which personal data this is not personal information. Now, when we say data it sounds like something neutral we now know that this is not neutral it is about personal information that personal information is going to transmit itself to various places and they will then make business out of it and that is how we are going to develop our economy. So, it is no longer I just all this is to say that it is no longer about you know do we have an other or not do I enroll you know and put it here or there or not it is about a change in our state. It is about a change in our relationship to many things in the world around that it is about a change in our relationship to who we are how we get reflected and how that gets used. So, the debate is far faster than nearly saying you know should I enroll for a UID today or not should I put it in this you put it in you know you enroll there is one whole set of places it goes. So, you get data based already and then there is in the UID project there is organic seeding and inorganic seeding. So, you can either go and put your number in your bank account or they can inorganic I mean without asking you they can just put it into the account they do not need you really for that. So, you in your passcode you may not you know you may say I do not want to give the number and it may be voluntary, but they can go ahead and put that number there anyway there is nothing to stop it from happening. So, we are now in a place where entering this system has no has no opt out and I will just stop there for a minute to say that hence from Meghalaya who had gone to the court who had you know who had filed petitions in the court who had battled all of this when they found that the Supreme Court judgment the majority judgment was saying that you can exist the system if you do not want to be in it only people who are because they made a you know an exception in all of this which will come back to in a bit for the poor of this country. They said those who are not looking for any kind of benefits or welfare from the state the rest of you if you want you can exist the system. So, a number of them sent letters to the UID AI saying we want to get out of this two days ago I got a mail from them saying that they have received the letters that they sent they have spent 22 rupees per letter and the large number of them has sent it out it all come back to them unopened. So, there is a you know there is a way in which we need to understand what this means because it is so easy to think of everyone is bad people and good people if the world does not work like that, but there are we do need to understand what these ambitions are and why these are happening. So, now the technology world now we know all the the debates that are going on around H1B visas and whether this causes can work or not some of Indian experts once reported that techies you know who are in the U.S. They have been saying at that time about a year or two ago that they would help from in building the wall that they would contribute to the building of the wall. So, long as they get their H1B visas cleared. So, there are you know various ways in which this kind of engagement has been happening within the tech world, but outside of this relationship between the tech world and the world outside tech has only been through our occasional straggler friends who being kind enough to explain some of these terms if we do not understand at all and understand these technologies which at least understand the meaning of what these technologies are. Now in artificial intelligence the one thing that it needs is data as much as it can get you know when we say there is an overload of data it will become a problem for AI they do not mind it just give us anything we will keep crunching it which is also why biases enter it because it depends on what kind of data gets in it depends on how that data gets reflected it depends on how it gets collected in the first place who has what prejudice even in the collection of it who has what prejudice in seeing how to read that data. So, there are a whole let us put prejudice aside and say this judgment on what you know how they view all of this. So, when you look at all of this you find that the reason AI seems to have come back now is because today you have digitization you have an ID that will go across various databases you have multiple databases that have this ID every transaction is now requiring it is not just that you are going to be authenticating yourself or verifying yourself in a system, but you are going every transaction that you do will be visible for various people to pick up and to use and that is a lot of information that they have and it is going to be across time and across population. So, it is a lot of data that AI now has and so you find for instance that the GSTN whose job you know the purpose of setting up the GSTN was that you have a goods and services tax system around the country and you need a you know you need a back office for this you need a technology back office so that it can deal with all of them. How can it be a private company? It is a private company we are asking it now, but you know ok. So, let me just give you a brief on the GSTN 2011 you have the tag up report one of the main things there is the GSTN and when they are talking about the GSTN in one paragraph they talk about how the data that comes in can very often be garbage in. So, how do you change that because now the system will clean itself because if it does not work for you there should be a way in which you will suffer. So, if my biometrics do not work then I am going to suffer for it and I will go back 10 times to try and re-enroll because I cannot collect my ratios under my biometrics. And if I do not see my biometrics do not work then the only way I can re-enroll is if I have a mobile phone because how are they going to authenticate this how are they going to verify this the right person who is coming to re-enroll. I can then go as you and say oh my biometrics is not working now put my fingerprints on that. So, they need for re-enrollment they need you to have a mobile phone because they will send an OTP on it and you have to give that. So, that has to be registered with the UIDAR and so you find that you know this is the system that they follow. Now, in GSTN in 2011 after the report came in and garbage in, garbage out and self-cleaning and all these suggestions were made and they talked in that report they said that this would be you know all this data would be given to a private company set up for that purpose where government can have between 26 and 49 percent. The majority shareholding will be with a private company. Now, GSTN itself is a company that was constituted by HTSC, HTSC banks, ICICI, NSDL and LIT houses. Thank you. So, that is the question that we need not just outsourced. Well, yeah, I mean privatized. It's much worse because the data today doesn't even pass through government. 2 to 5 billion vouchers by Mr. Nilikani saying goes directly to this company which then analyzes the data and gives you know so it conducts the task. The other thing also to remember is this a lot because these are a few technology companies that are getting involved in all of this and there's a lot of conflict of interest. So, for instance Mr. Nilikani become part of you know he becomes a chairperson of UIDAI and after that he you know he writes this tag up committee report then GSTN gets set up. So, in 2000 that means it gets set up then the first big you know among the big contracts given is to enforcers then because of circumstances and enforcers Mr. Nilikani goes back to enforcers at the same time the GSTN you know work is being done by them. There's a lot of conflict of interest which you know in the US they are still concerning themselves with antitrust and monopoly regime which is what all these companies are bringing in because they just gobble up all the smaller companies so that nobody else can come in anywhere. But in India it is a little different in the way in which it works where we are seeing a different kind of relationship between the state and these companies and the business interest is sitting there doing government work with them and sharing that. So, as people we need to be able to understand what all this means and you know we have to there's a lot of deciphering for us to do because it's only when we decipher all of this we will even know how to engage with the state you know on any of this. And it is important to do some crystal ball gauging and what does it mean? It means that some of the haze has to shift without that you can't do it. 2012 Prandtlap Mukherjee who was then the finance minister announces in the budget that GSTN will be an NIR national information utility which is what the tag up report calls the private company. 2013 long before the GST amendment has come long before they set up their system the company is already registered of company. So, when they when it and then you find that when they start in 2016 when they begin the GSTN is already in place and the data goes directly to them and then the contracts are given to certain technology companies. Now, you find after that I think last year 2018 the GSTN said that they would be using the data that they have to start working out a credit giving system. So, what is it now you are creating a fintech business where you say I can see all the people who are on this you know I can see at granular you can see it you can also see it in you know and create algorithms out of it. So, they were going to create they have been creating algorithms which will help them see who they can give who needs loans in what season do they need loans. What kind of money is it that they will need and then we will offer them money at that time using the consent architecture. So, it is basically you reveal yourself to this private company and the private company then decide what is the least you know risk I mean what is the most risky way in which they can give you loan and then that is passed off. So, it is quite interesting because when the cooking court case was on there were 5 business entities which appeared in the cooking court saying in January 2018 where they came and said that listen please do not change anything in this project because our business will go part if you do this. One of them was the digital lenders association. So, for them digital footprints is very important, but for the GSTN it is a huge advantage because everybody is you know everybody who is doing any business of any kind every consultant if you notice everybody is put on that database along with the UID number and a GSTN number and a telephone number and a bank number anything more. So, basically and then they will decide who they are going to give credit to that was interesting because the government there were reports that the government had stepped in and said that now we are going to make GSTN into a 100 person government company because all this was being after demonetization it was important to reach the small person and this seemed to be now a very good way which the government had not thought of before, but a private company was going to be. I have no idea what happened after that, but the next report was that you know after saying it across two months then they said then it died down and it continues to remain and continues as a private company and so this ability to be able to see to know to decide what to do with people and to have a you know you need you seen these all these trying files and all know you will find that there will be a window kind of thing where you can only look in, but the person inside can't see you it is a little bit like that. So, now you know who you are, but apart from that so this is the kind of thing that we need to be able to understand. I just want to give one illustration at this point on what says how this you know the fintech story somewhere, but we do not you know very little about the health story. So, when the UID project was started we find that one of the early documents along with NREGA, UID and NREGA, UID and PDS we also had UID and public health. So, one and a half page you know scimpy documents which really does not say very much except that it says that health would be a killer application on which they could I am sorry, but it is not my language there in the document that it will be a killer application which will help them garner a lot of information. So, the whole thing was about which are the applications which will help us get all the enrollments and which will help us in updating that information regularly, because that information should not become yeah it should not become so back dated that it has no validity at all. So, regularly it is not enough to enroll you have to keep using it so that you keep updating that information. If you change your residence, if you know to change your name, if you change your status, if you if your biometrics are changed all that has to be constantly updated within this. So, one you know one of the things that interested us was why the UID AI kept saying that we do not have any information with us, we have only bare minimal information, we do not keep anything else and it is not the UID AI does not itself collect all the health data and collect all this other you know PDL data and keep it with itself. What it does is to act as a bridge between all of these. In addition, the authentication log tells them where all you have your various kinds of activities which gives them a profile of who you are, if you never go to a PDS shop then you are one kind of person, if you go to a PDS shop you are one kind of person, if you get job in an NREJ one kind of person, if you are in the EPA for you are one kind of person, if you are getting so security pension, so it gives various ways. So, now for AI, applying AI to this will make it possible to categorize these populations in various kinds of ways and figure out what kind of businesses can be done through this. Now, the Shree Krishna committee report does one more thing which is the discussion that they had on innovation. If you read the before the final report, you will find that in that white paper they say that there are two models that we could follow. The first model that we can follow is the American model and the second model is the EU model. American model is the laissez-faire model where companies do what they will because companies are free to do whatever they want. This is the libertarian model. This model is the rights model where they say that you have to respect the rights of people in any kind of technology application. And what was being advocated here was the American model saying that listen, we also need to have all these big companies. So, you find that one of the ways through which they want to you know want Indian companies to flourish is by doing data localization. When you do data localization, just doing data localization produces its own business. If Adani is going to have a huge, you are going to be one of those who are holding data. Now, even in data localization, it is not as if each person will be holding it in their servers. It will be all in an aggregation and Adani is looking to do it. There are many others who are looking, you know, this is big business and you are going to be holding all this data. What they are going to do? Data localization is something that is pushed in the Shree Krishna committee report. It is the interest of the local businesses. It is good like Mr. Mukesh Ambani was when he spoke about this, where he said that data of Indians, why is it sitting in America and you know wherever else? It should not be outside the country. It should be here because it should then be with Indians at least with Indian companies. So, these are stated things. So, we just, you know, many of these we really don't need to do any interpreting. They are telling us and we need to learn how to understand this and what we do with this kind of data. Now, some of us, this is very scary, not only because our monies will go and our lives will go and our freedoms will go, but because we know that the poor in most countries are just being treated like they are a burden of the state. So, for many companies, the libertarian, if the libertarian view that is being propagated through this data localization and through this idea that you should not have any fetters in how companies function. Now, that libertarian way of looking at this does not really prove for people who are not relevant to the market. We know now, after 20, 30 years, we know now that the market has failed, but we also know that the power of those who control the changes in systems will not allow this failure to be acknowledged for a very long time. They will push it as far as they can and in the meantime, what happens to them? And just yesterday, I was reading a review of a book about James Buchanan. And it is fascinating to see what those ideas were and I think maybe we also need to look at some of these other people who have been spinning off these theories because those theories are now being used where why how is it that in a country like this we have such extremes of 73% will produce being with 1% of the population. How does it even happen? And why is that seen as something that cannot be addressed? So, these questions are not unimportant questions and the answers lie in the places where we usually look. So, we might learn to look otherwise just to understand what these phenomena are. Now, it is not only data localization that that report talks about. If you read the draft of that Shri Krishna draft and that was going to be picked up by the government and they have been looking to make a law, there are 2-3 things about it that are very important. You have to put in my use of the word. Now, I have understood it by now. I am not sure you understood it right. There are many other things you saw and got it wrong. So, what did you get? So, one of the things is the way in which state feeds this idea of data collection. See, the thing is when the AP Shah committee report works and just as a declaration, I was part of that committee and I remember all the discussions we had on this idea of the 9 principles that people can take. One of those was on data transfer. The idea of data transfer, you cannot just transfer amongst yourselves. There has to be a whole country, not the consent of the person. You have to know and there are certain ways in which you cannot transfer data. You cannot transfer data. All those rules are being broken down. So, if you read the Shri Krishna committee report, there are all manner of loop holes in it to collect more information than you actually require. So, where do we first feed it openly? We see it when you look at the UIDAI memorandum of understanding with various state governments and various entities. What do they tell them? They tell them, listen, we are getting into an MOU. You have to help us get a view by giving back the number to you so you can link it up to whatever information you have. This is not an all. No, not an all. You also find the additional data you want at that. So, the poor are told, you go and enroll immediately, get yourself a number, put your number, otherwise you are not going to get your PDA subject. So, they have to go and do each of these. They do not have a choice. And go and do this. When they go and do this, I am going to skip a bit because I find I am taking too much time on this. But it is basically to say that personal data, the idea of personal data and personal data becomes a part of what you were dealing with. So, I am going to stop there because I kind of got some people things and it is too much. I will go on. I will move on to the next thing of health. So, we had UID and public health. Then after a few years, actually soon after the UID project started, you find that there is a committee that is set up, which is going to look at how health records will be made. So, initially it is health records in public hospitals. And they say this can be extended to private hospitals, extended to pharmacies and it can be extended to anything within the health system. Now, in this health record committee, you have PCS and you have PT. Now, somebody was telling me about a meeting that happened in Kennai a few days ago on the SMART PT project. And he was telling me that I went for this meeting thinking, you know, speaking that I would be hearing something because if you look at the document, the document is about how you have garbage disposal, how you do all kinds of things. And then, but when he went to the meeting, he says all he heard was data, data, data, and he said I couldn't see a single architect, town planner, nobody there. They were all people who were talking e-governance and then they were saying, you know, people should be made to give data, but if they refuse, we should incentivize and I will send you the language. I mean, the language is just amazing. I am not yet able to remember it because I just read it once when they sent it to me. But it is about this valuation and capitalization of that value and it has nothing to do with the SMART city except that the SMART city's basic role is going to be generation of data. So, one of the fascinating things that I find in this and I think if we could discuss it, it will be useful is the extent, you know, to look at PDS for about 2, 3, 4 years. The whole focus in the PDS system was only in putting UID in there. And then, they weeded out a large number of people. So, if you look at Virginia Eubank's book, Automating Inequality, she actually demonstrates how something that is seen as a tool of inclusion is actually a tool of exclusion. And it is held, so if you do not conform, you are out and you are conforming very often is not in your control. So, you are, you know, I cannot make my biometric work. You know, I cannot grow older. But that is my problem. That is not the problem of the system. That is what we are seeing. We are also seeing that the way these systems are structured, it excludes, it throws people off the system. So, they will say 11.5 lakh ration cards were cancelled because they did not link up with the UID. And then you say, who are these 11, 11.5 lakhs? Have you gone and verified whether they exist or not? They say, no, it is their job to come and make work that we are able to get on to the system. If you do not, you are one of three things. You are either a fake or a duplicate or a go. Continue. I have chosen both. So, if, you know, we have reached that kind of point. And I think one of the interviews that we may want to see, because it tells us that there is a certain, there are certain things that cannot be disturbed in this project. So, there is a very interesting interview which Mr. Veer Sanjee has written. And Veer Sanjee asked him three times that he is during the interview. You know, if a 11-year-old has died because the system has not worked, doesn't it bother you? And I will just request you to go back and see what his answers are. Because, you know, it is too easy to say these are bad people or good, you know, and these are TVP people. It is too easy. It is just that this system cannot operate with privacy. It cannot operate by making sure it doesn't exclude people. It cannot operate if it is a, if it is with a feedback system. Till today, the only grievance redressant that you can have is, you know, is in a sense insulting us by asking us to call 1947 and leave a complaint. So, I am starving and dying here and I ring up 1947 and they say, we will deal with it. So, there is no way you are going to get any kind of it. So, it is plain that the system doesn't want to respond. I will just, before I go on to the rest, the parts of health, just to say this too, that the, just like data localization, the other part of what they deal with is the idea of innovation. And the idea is that innovation requires freedom. It can't be bound by rule. You can't tell an innovator that there is a constitution of India that guarantees fundamental rights to the, they are not independent. Because, if you are going to stifle innovation with fundamental rights, then that's really not going to work. So, you need, you look at, I mean, because America left them free, you see the kind of things that they had. Now, nobody wants to talk Edward Snowden. Because America allowed them to do what they wanted and because of the relationship between the state and America. And because in America, so people say, what about America? I say, please don't look to the US for human rights and fundamental rights. That's really not a good idea. And after Snowden, I don't know why we would even look at that. And it's fascinating the response that the Indian government of that day had to Snowden. They said, at least America is helping us deal with terror. And therefore, they have all our information and they can do what they will with it. So, it seems like from that response that we cannot expect the state to protect our interests in the context of sovereignty. Sovereignty of the nation. Sovereignty of the people is between us and the state. Sovereignty of the nation is vis-a-vis state. And it seems like we cannot depend on that. We also know that what we had happening in the Snowden thing also showed us that secret orders, the secret court, secret tribunals, secretly executed, all of these were the complicit, you saw the complicity of various companies. And there is a book that Glenn Greenwald wrote before Snowden happened about an earlier episode where the companies got caught out having breached the privacy rule. And then they got caught out. And they got caught out, they panicked because they were giving it to the NSA. There was no rule at that time saying that you, you know, if you give it to the NSA, you won't let them, you won't let your people know. In America, if they had gone to the court with it, then there would have been huge damages that the company could have had to do. So, the Bush administration, he explains how the Bush administration then went and made a retrospective law saying that those companies did not have, you know, the breach notice was not applied to these companies. So, there is a very, an enormous closeness that you find between these. But here when they say that innovation should not be stifled, they are saying that like they did with UID, you do not want the law. You want the project to proceed. We'll see how much of it works. We'll see what kind of rules can fit the project and not the other way. So, this is something that we need to keep in mind too, because very often I get asked the question. Now it looks like I have no choice but that I have to get on to this. It's a question that I have to ask myself too, not only other people who are asking. And then the answer to that is that actually you're not just getting on to a system. You're not getting on to an ID system and the registration there. You're getting on to a system which is taking you into many places which you don't even know what exists in in in those parts. Recently in Bulgaria, there was a data leak and data breach. They have no idea what where the data has gone. They don't know who's going to be used. They don't know when it will be used and they don't know how to protect people whose identities have been stolen. If they say something like 90 percent of the adult population. In the US, you had equally fact where the data got stolen and the all the social security information got leaked including violence. So when we are talking about this kind of, you know, why is it that when there is clear evidence, the evidence is not showing that these systems work. The evidence is showing that these systems are a problem parading in the in the name of a solution. And if these system, if these failures can clearly be seen to exist, why is it that there is a push to carry on? In coming back to the health, just that we look at some of these documents because we need to inform ourselves a little bit more before we are able to do some crystal ball data. So we need to look at some of these documents. Now after that committee was set up, they then had, they brought out a report in 2013 on electronic health records. And then in 2016 that was updated and you have electronic health records having come in. That record, that those health records, economic health records tell us how every, in every one of these, you know, every record it has to be accessible across, across the country, various people to be able to do it. The safety that they tell us is that only you, that your biometric will be able to open, I mean, you will be able to open it. Only you can open it. But we know by now that biometrics are not being used anywhere except on the poor. Have you seen it being used anywhere else? Geo used it for a while. Have you seen it being used anywhere else? Because it is not in the banking system, it is not used. And when they put it, and when they tried using it in the EPFO, they found that it was not working for more. So we know that the failure rate of biometrics is extremely high, which means that it is the number and the uniqueness that that number gives which is going to be used. And the connection that it has with the mobile phone number, so if you have a mobile number, I can find out what your UID number is. And if you have a UID number, I can find out what your bank account number is. So this kind of being able to open various database with the multiple keys that are being created is something that we need to learn to get our head around. I do not think we have got our head around. The next document that came up was the National Health Stack. The National Health Stack is interesting because this is the first time there is an open admission. And it is not an admission because they do not see it as being wrong. So it is an open statement that the India Health, that is the, the head, what is it, India Stack and the National Health Stack are working together. So Niti Aayog has the India Stack people sitting inside there and telling them how they need to create a National Health Stack. In that National Health Stack document, they have the jammed address. So you know it is like one project of being able, the project therefore is to have all of us on databases, capable of being profiled, capable of being converted into data, capable of that, that data being capable of being converted into businesses. In 2013, there is a fireside chat. Please go and take a look at it. It is not seen it before. There are fireside chats between three people that is Mr. Vinod Kotla, Mr. Vikant Nathamuni and Mr. Nandan Nilekani. And they are talking and they are addressing a team of techies and telling them, so how many more people have built up businesses which are based on the UID system. More and more people need to do this. So the idea that this data has been created for creating business is already what I will credit them with, those who have these ambitions is that open. It is on YouTube, it is on the World Bank website, it is on documents. It is all openly said. So these are not people who are doing things artificially. And maybe I have got my understanding wrong, but there are, for instance, on think tech, there were slippages that happened because demonetization got called at a certain time and not at another time. All these can be analyzed and we can try and understand what happened. So not all ambitions work, but many of these will work 40 percent, 50 percent and that is enough for business. What it does to a people is a completely different story. And we may need to look at that and see what all this means. Then you have the national health staff, they say in that document that the data that you have, they say India will have the maximum amount because of the national health staff and how all medical data will be, health data will be collected. India will have the maximum amount of health data and therefore, in the global market we are going to be, we are going to be very big because all this health data has been collected. So I just want to say one way we have come to think about this, which is we call it the eminent domain principle. This is a country where for the longest time we have had from British times with the land acquisition act and before land acquisition act really formalized something that would exist before. And it has, there has been an expansion of the idea of the relationship between state and land. So earlier why you used to say that there has to be a public purpose for which private land can be taken by the government on payment of compensation. Now we have a slightly different version over the years that the government will say public purpose it does not matter if that public purpose is not served, they can anyway take whatever land they want and they can you know if it is right to trade, they do not even have to pay, they do not have to go through a process, shrinking of procedure all of that is saying that basically all land in the territory of India belongs to the land. And therefore they are only taking back water there. So that idea has kind of become part of how eminent domain has expanded. That has worked with water, you remember all the Coca-Cola wards that happened about who you are going to give off the river to and you know all kinds of minerals. And now we find that the human body and personal information are now being treated openly, this is one I am not just saying this. If you look at the Shri Krishna committee report you will see that your data and my data are being talked about as national wealth. If you look at the budget, the economic survey this time you will find that our data is being talked about as a public good which has to therefore be allowed to you know for the government to use and to monitor. If you look at what happens in parliament you will find that you have a minister who goes to parliament and says that we have monetized the vehicle registration data and the driving license data so that you know some 65 crores and 35 crores. The government is meeting our data and us as the property of the state. So the idea you know it has got inverted where the state belongs to the people now the people belong to the state. So how are we going to address this and what do we understand by this. So some of the and the two other things so one is on AI. Therefore AI come back with a bang now because all this information exists and when you look at all the information that is everywhere which is identifiable information granular can also be made into you know algorithms to read and do multiple kinds of things to decide what kind of businesses can exist and that all of our personal information has to serve the market it has to serve GDP it has to be a sign of growth we are talking about something completely different. So the DTIO also has a document on AI they have a document on e-commerce each of which for instance they are talking about India's being the market place for data that will be the data warehouse. So we are looking and like Icepert which is a very strong part of all of this like Icepert has told us one billion of the world's population may be serviced by the Silicon Valley company six billion will be serviced by our company here. So this idea that we need to colonize the rest of the world in terms of data is also one of the ambitions that exist. So we have to see what we think about and whether it's okay or not whether as you know whether our economy growing on the personal information of people in India and in Tanzania and Gabon and wherever it is is it okay by us and is that the kind of relationship that we seek with other countries and is that the kind of power equation that we want these are things that we have to because we know that companies will have their umbrella but when we speak to the state we need to first find avenues and then to be able to explain to them why we think this is not okay that's part of the exercise that we may have to undertake. The kind of questions that we find that are coming up there for are some are immediate and some are a little not for you. So one question that has come up is what do we do about income tax? That's the problem that many of us have had in because the thing is as a lawyer I find it fascinating how we went through various stages first saying it's voluntary if you want for your you know for your benefit if you don't want it's okay and then saying that it's mandatory then when the court says it's not mandatory because in court they said it's voluntary and then the court said okay keep it voluntary then the UI DEI under Mr. Nilek and his chair personally actually goes back to court and says allow us to make it mandatory because that's the only way the subject can work. And then you know the and then no law and then a law gets introduced because of pressure and then when that law gets introduced and it's you know the laws crashed by the parliamentary standing committee you say okay you passed it then I'll go without the law then bringing in a law as a money bill then later two years later when the court gives a judgment saying come private companies cannot use it first and this is the thing that we also need to think about private companies cannot use it was one part of the other part of the judgment is actually far more disturbing because it is a it's a kind of hit on constituting and somewhere that's the only protection we have between the state and us and between even even in relation to a court that's the only protection we have that we can go to court and say this is unconstitutional now what the court has done is to say that okay the nine judge bench has said that privacy is a fundamental they also said that you cannot waive anybody's fundamental now this you have a three three judges the three judge majority judgment in the UID matter is one year later they say that anyway for the poor privacy is not important so we are going to waive the right for that it's all right and this is why when you say privacy is not important so say in court when you are going to use the court you have to use all these letters because you speak to the court in a language they understand and which will increase the right for people but what did they do here they turned around and said that the poor have only need for dignity and their dignity is linked up with having food so if they have been given welfare services and that is enough for that I think we do need to apply our minds to this and I try and understand why this is being done in the context of the court what is it that the court has been so important that they felt that the rights of the poor have to be whittled down so that this project can survive what was it that made this happen because I think somewhere there is an abandonment of the poor that happens in this whole thinking that we think of mobile phone we think of bank account we think of IT we just not thinking of the poor and the poor actually are dying everyday our death may also come but it may come like Shakespeare said when it will come but here we are actually seeing it happen now so why is it that you know why is it that we are not getting agitated that this project is actually producing death and still and exclusions of various persons with leprosy saying I am not able to enroll to become the newspaper article then you have somebody from the UIDI going and saying no no no to that poem and saying we will help people enroll then you enroll but every time for them to authenticate themselves and get it they have to depend on somebody's goodness because there is no system in place so why is it that the most vulnerable in this country are getting abandoned by everybody so this is not just happening with the state and company it is happening with everybody the newspapers have at least begun to report when there is a death if I tell you and I don't know if you notice this the last death in jargon actually ended in an exhumation if a project is producing exhumation of a person because the state said oh did he really die of starvation or did he not I need to find that out so you exhum a body just think about what it means around us and why we are not shocked more than we are this is one of the one of the ways in which I it is important to question the project question the government question the state but why is it that we don't even know the question to ask of ourselves and of how we are responding to many of these see so the immediate question therefore is what do we do about typing and actually you know this is the land of Mahatma Gandhi never mind who says and if there's one thing that was fascinating you know that you won't talk about that registration and fast system in the South Africa right it's a fascinating story someday you must read it there's a book called and it's by a by a person called Charles Dupal and he he gives all the cases that Gandhi did and he learned his politics and how to work with politics too also through you know these cases that he did get created and all that you find that when they went in for registration they asked all the asiatics to register and put their by and he objected he said nobody should do this what kind of thing you're treating us differently and you're coercing us to do this and at that time the understanding of what all this meant had not evolved very much so they were basically saying don't make this compulsory you want us to handle why you're treating us like it was about the treatment that was needed after the same thing i will compel you you come you stand in line you put your thumb for it he said we are not going to do you treat us decently later you tell us take away the coercion we'll come and enroll ourselves but i'm not going to tell you a whole story but the fascinating thing in this was how a man who had gone there as a lawyer to some business houses is able through his what i don't want you need to figure that out to get 3000 people in one south africa to come to one meeting and say no we are not going to register because this is demeaning to us and we think this is wrong when finally and there is a whole string of stories before you come to the final part where gandhi had written a letter to the south african administration and then he got back so there was some confusion about that and because he felt he was a man of his word and he had said that i will voluntarily enroll if you take this you know come coercion away he went and he he went to enroll the people around him beat him up he had you know he had bruises and maybe even broken bones and they had to help him recover after that so it was not a man who was some Mahatma who was being treated like he's he should just follow his word when he did not stick to that word they beat him up anyway to enroll that's the time why will he do it and how did it happen what has happened to us that we think that we don't owe responsibility to us so what is this you know that sometimes you need to speak to the state by telling the state that they are wrong by saying that this is not okay therefore we are not going to be a part of you can't you shouldn't be a part of this and you shouldn't be asking us to be a part of this second thing is that the income tax department today says that we are going to hand over all the data to do wouldn't we at least be asking them to be intent to do this because you can't have function three places and if one person writes and two people write then obviously they're not even going to do it why should they care now you find that if many people write they send back unopened letters that's our later victory so we have to find other ways of being there if we care to be there because there is you know there is a way in which we can allow these things to happen around us by not speaking and it's important to speak to the state I don't think cynicism has any role in this at all we have to speak to the state but we have to speak in multitude and in multimedia it can't be just through writing letters it can't be just through going to a court one of the things this morning we were discussing this the number of cases that are being filed for instance by one person who says who goes to the high court himself now link the UID the voter ID with UID what are the other things and property record property record with the UID and then the court issues notice on this and who's on the other side the state and the state is all along been saying that we want to link it with everything so who's going to pick up her so are we even watching this and what are we doing about it because it's all you know it can't become just a conversational exercise it has to be more than that because without sounding without making a too much of it I think we are actually passing through dangerous time because the people who understand what is happening and are doing this which is basically persons in the world of technology and not even the first to work in technology each of whom is given a separate task but technology controller so who are controlling the whole idea and what say the poor of this country or the middle class they care about the market they care about their profit market and they care about what happens with them now how do we teach them that P2 exists and that you cannot have this manner of thing happening so are we going to speak to the income tax department and tell them that please give us a written assurance now and speak loudly in multiple places that you are not going to be you know that the court may have said that you can use it for income tax purposes but the court did not say you can do it without privacy protection where what are the privacy protections if there is a breach tomorrow and this data gets out to somebody else how will you let us why we are not even asking them these questions and if you intend function creep where you are already proudly announcing that you are going to hand this data over to DSPF we have not given the right over our data to you we have only allowed you to use it so that you know we pay that and this idea that we raise questions but we don't demand and you can't I know after that tell the income tax department you should have answered us is people so there are people this this you know escape has to be responsible for people you have to teach them how they need but we need to learn first how we ask the question and that you know you can't keep waiting we can't make the pieces out of this that five years understanding so we have to do it as soon as we can the second thing is I think we need really to immediately get clarity on this idea of data ownership property data as property and data as my mind it is very clear that data is simple to integrate to oneself and and that's what the 15 court strategy does and the data is something that belongs in a way which it cannot become complete it's not even a kidney for me to it can't get into this really not any of that so how do we do this and how are we going to start addressing this one other thing that we may want to do this is you know data protection because in data protection they're telling us that we will keep the data and we'll keep it kept but you can't tell us we can't keep the data and we are saying no it's not your you can't keep it you use it for a particular purpose get rid of it after all it is not your thing so how then do we because there are some youngsters who are looking at data protection as an answer and they will say oh there is not even data protection even if there was data protection it would be no good so how are we going to address this and we need to do these things and what are we going to do about expanding the idea of biometrics where now facial recognition has come in in a in the meeting that we had in tunis we had the microsoft person who said that we are doing facial recognition now and this is causing many of the heart-rending you know my heart is on my degree and he kind of problem so they said you know we we've identified children and they've been restored to their parents so he said really I mean what what is the age of children because actually very young children and very old people so he said and you know persons with dementia with you know who just wander off old people then he said really are you able to do to them he had to admit later that very young children and old very old people facial recognition doesn't work because many of the things that identify you know that are the identifiers in a phase they fade out and they've not yet come little children they fade out then we said are you telling us that 13 14 15 year olds who leave their house maybe because of abuse of circumstances you know or maybe because of extreme poverty where they can't even afford to be where they are you're going to forcibly repatriate them into those homes is that what you're going to use this for so there is no sociology there is no anthropology there is no politics there is no law nothing behind it in India landlord has this effort who hoarding saying missing children have been found and taken back if they've actually done it they've broken the law and whoever used the system for that has to be put behind us because the act is very clear that you cannot use it for any of people if they go to court they get an order that they're going to use it and who are these children and how did they find it so this idea and then less than five you are not allowed you know biometrics don't work so what are they saying what is it that they're saying they're using it for it's an advertisement you can say and it is even possible that if they went into the system and used the system maybe half a dozen children they found their families because if you go and try and enroll them and then you find that their biometric already exists then you check whether the same person is there or not or whether they are at home if it is a new person who's wrongly been identified as a person it's even possible you've got a problem so you're going to put everybody at peril because you're going to do this against the law so these projects are never going to be bound by the law and when you look please read the documentation that's coming up now on how police are actually tracking the people there is a whole network that has to be put in place it can't be done by these shortcut methods so this kind of advertising so one of the suggestions that came up yesterday in a bombay meeting was to say why is the advertising council doing nothing don't they owe a responsibility why do they have a regulatory authority if they are not going to work so then we go to them but when they see this kind of thing happening actually there are many people who can't complain even to the council and take this up these are not just saying your VIP box of your whatever your attaching cases of certain dimensions this is about the liberty of people and yet it is being done without any kind of authority of law we need to worry about what all but we must remember that there is everywhere they are saying have we even investigated what does the CCTV do and what is it expected to do you have patient recognition now you have patient analysis in the smart city they are only talking about you can see some people who are loitering in an area then they are suspicious characters and we have to go and take out who they are whoever is sitting behind the camera and looking at me is an extremely suspicious person so there is that kind how do we bring that answer to the pain and how do we reject certain technology these are all taking and remember this that our responsibility doesn't stop with it here it goes to all you know after jamaican supreme court judgment where the you know where the judge defended upon our minority judge our dissenting judge and said that he seems to have understood what the issues are not the majority and said and what did the dissenting judge have inside all the petitioners problems and they said therefore we cannot uphold this system what I do here has implications and we do it publicly we are not doing it so it has implications for other countries and therefore now our responsibility has grown not just to worry about ourselves we have to worry about those who are getting excluded there is time to live and those lives are going to see one thing so the longest time you keep saying signs and technology and in my mind I think and you know even when you talk to them you write s and t as if it's just one thing and then you realize it's not at all the same sign requires evidence sign requires testing sign cannot you know without proof you don't have sign whereas technology the way it is rolling out now is about not knowing but using whole populations as experimentally how are we going to respond to some of these things and one last thing of course is that we also need to think about things that don't see any media people in that camp but which is very much part of our for instance Mr. Likani had done a report on toll collection and then he you know there were various places where we thought he suggested that RFID could be put on every car and then saying that it will make it easy for you to go across course and then in an article he wrote last year he says now we can have RFID leaders at regular intervals so you can manage urban traffic and then you sell vehicle registration data you sell driver licensing data you think about what universe you are entering and see whether it's happening with Google already right so the question that we got asked therefore I didn't get a chance to answer it then so I'll answer it now in IIT Bombay that you know Google is doing it already once again and I think was the whole effort now in the EU in EU the effort is to tone Google down and to find them every time they do something like this and to make their profitability in the US there are whole residential elections that are going to be fought on breaking these companies down and we are using that as an example for why we allow RFID to do this. No in the sense like when you spoke about data being used for you know managing urban environment like I guess like such information like with proper regulation proper regulatory channels every like those bit of information can be of like good use for people like for common people like for me if I would know depending on like when I see a satellite image of where I am I would see where the traffic is dense and where the traffic is in there so that would be true data aggregation it is. So now what do you have you have radio channels where you say wherever you are just call it and tell us what the traffic is there it doesn't track anybody these are tracking devices so every see there is there is nothing that is totally useless even arsenic has its purpose right but we have to see how much of this is arsenic at all and arsenic has assistance and is this arsenic at all so one danger that I found is that when we take a marketing statement something to sell the product for instance I mean I was just looking at the smart cities project document and the smart cities project document is totally different so in that also it will help you you know if I put RFID inside your dustbin that it will segregate garbage very good idea what else is it tracking and they in the meeting that they have in close go you are saying that use RFID so that we will be able to track all of this we have data on all manner of things and that can then get you know become because if you read there is a book on RFID I think it is called spy chips let's take a look at the book see what it says because you know in a marketplace for instance it is useful for them to know what you know what are the things that you look at how long you look at them do you put it back in keep it in your mind everything is analyzed so they know you better than you know your mind with that that's okay yes that you shouldn't ask everyone to do that so for people who voluntarily do it I have I've had friends who say I've given my DNA because I want my answer what is my you want to do it at your own risk because you are not going to get anything get some report back but it's going to be used in multiple days if it's okay with you it's okay suppose the whole population database is going to be ever been