 So I'll just launch into it straight off, see this voter ID, UID link, which is being proposed now, like we all know is not anything new. The idea has been forever that this will be, everything will be linked with everything and the UID number will be, should be found everywhere in every database. This was the original plan, this was the conception, so it should not be surprised that it's happening now. It's just that it's not a good idea. What is more recent is an admission, if I can call it that, by Mr. Ramseh Vaksharma and AP Singh on behalf of the UID AI when it was started. Speaking as founding members of the UID AI, they have said, and it's on YouTube now, they have categorically stated that this UID AI and the database that is created was not created by them, thinking that it would be of use to the government, but that it could be used to create a digital economy. That is, it's there in the other 2.0 proceedings. It's on the session that they had on digital what's it, commerce, digital, what do we call ourselves, a digital economy. So it's in that session. So it's kind of open now and there is no doubt at all about why this was created. This is very useful to know because it also tells us why exclusion, which has been caused by the UID AI and by the way that database works, why exclusion has not been a problem. And that to create a business infrastructure and in 2018 when the case was being argued in court, Mr. Nellakini wrote an article in the paper where he said, listen, this is really not just an ID, it's creating infrastructure, it's like creating a road, anybody can use that road and that's the purpose of this whole exercise because it will boost the economy. So I think one of the, from the time that we started, that the project started where they were saying that this has to do with delivering services, that the poor need an ID, that the poor need to do whatever it is that they need to do whatever they can to be able to identify themselves to the state and that that is the purpose for which this whole project was started from there to the admission now that it was never intended for the state. In fact, they use very interesting language where they say that the state is now holding this captive, that they've usurped this system, which was never meant for them and they are advising Mr. Ram Sehwaj Sharma and APC are advising the UIDA that it's time for them to stop being a regulator and for them to take it back and give it back to the digital economy. So that's something that I'm stressing on because I think we need to be very clear that they are not, if we listen, we can hear what's being said and that will help advance our understanding. The second thing is just a brief on what is this database with which the voter wants, voter ID, election commission wants to link it. What kind of a database is this? So we know that it is a database that was started. I think Debushesh Basu says it very well in his piece for the business standard, which is titled Torture Under Transparent Taxation because now you have income tax proving to be a huge problem because the way in which that income tax system has been the digital system has been rolled out is proving to be a huge disaster. So why is he is angsting about it, right? So thorough testing before the launch and continuous debugging through feedback after the launch are the cornerstones of any software development. Amazingly, a tech savvy government, which has digital India as one of its missions, didn't do this adequately. Remember, Aadhar and Boots and Services Tax were launched with the same attitude, no need to test or bother about feedback. So this is what that whole project is characterized by, that you launch it, you see how it goes, you see what works. There is a whole population that's waiting there to become experimentally-delete experience. And these are now known positions. So there is very little to debate on. What is interesting about this, though, is that one of the persons who's been pushing for this is Mr. Kureishi, who's actually quite a liberal kind of person with whom one can hold a conversation. But on the UID, he seems to think that that's fine. In fact, in one of the interviews, he says, Nandini Likini came to my office and told me when I was there that it's a good idea and we decided that we will link these two. We have seen that throughout this project, it is marketing of this idea rather than actually, you know, figuring out what is happening, what this project is about, that's what has been characterized by. It's just marketing. So we find I was actually intrigued when on 9th November year before last, when when Mr. Ramseh Vaksharma's book came out, they had a discussion on and after discussion in 2020. From October 31st, there was an there was a expose. I mean, they done, you know, one of the Abhishek had done an investigative piece and then it carried on. I mean, from October 31st till well into December, almost every day, there would be an article about how minorities, scholarships had got siphoned off and how the UID was used for the siphoning off and it just required three people, the principal of a school, a business correspondent kind of person and one other, you know, the person who's operating the machine for them to be able to get together and siphon off a whole load of monies that were meant for minority scholarships. And so this started on August 31st and on 9th November of 2020, you have this discussion on Mr. Ramseh Vaksharma's book and there are four bureaucrats who are sitting there and having this discussion and they seem completely oblivious to there is any problem at all, that UID has not that it has produced any problem that people are having difficulties with it, that corruption is actually being fostered through this and that, you know, it's very important that the Indian Express expose, they did not expose it as something that was happening in the government. They got information from activists in the field that this is happening and they did an investigation themselves. The system hasn't responded to this at all. So now they've referred it in 2020, they referred it to the CBI, they referred it to a whole host of people, nothing has happened. Two days ago we found that there was a, you know, in Delhi, Delhi High Court, it's a case that was registered for the court in 2020 January and in 2020 January, the court is telling them because there were some 400 and odd people who accordingly the charges that a district magistrate had taken all these, who is himself from Rajasthan had taken in all these people from Rajasthan and enrolled them as having Delhi addresses so that they could apply for a job in the DTC and somebody filed saying that listen, it needed domicile, these people don't belong here but it was a fraud that was committed. So there's a case that's been that he wrote to the Delhi government, the Delhi government filed a case and it hasn't proceeded because the UIDI refuses to cooperate. So it's a, we're reading things like this every day and it amazes me that you have whole bureaucracies which say we have no idea what any of this, this is technology, this is fine, there is no problem, if there are problems here and there we kind of sort it out, we figure out what we do but we are not going to acknowledge the kind of problem that exists. This is the project and this is the bureaucratic response to the project. We also recently saw meaning like yesterday, Money Life had out an article where they said that as a, they had written about an RTI that they filed where they said that 8 crore, 8 crore updates every year is what the UIDI says they manage. So it's 7 to 8 crores, they don't give you the breakup, they say we don't know what the various breakups are, it could be for address, it could be for name, it could be for mobile phone, it could be for whatever, for biometrics but there are 8 crore updates that happen all the time. So this is what, which essentially means and I'll just move from there to this thing called the target report which I'm sure many of you have seen where the target report was given in 2011 January and Mr. Nilakani was its chair and they had said, it was about all these revenue systems and how the revenue systems have to be, what's the best way to deal with them because you have to introduce technology. So tag ups stood for technology advisory group on unique projects and in that, in the sixth chapter in the report, they have a thing called, they talk about what they call a self-cleaning mechanism and I'm just going to read two, three lines from that for you. As the saying goes, this is about data quality, as the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out and IP system is only as good as the data it consumes. The system design should have a self-cleaning mechanism. For instance, for example, the UIBAI proposes to authenticate the identity of a resident based on data they have provided during enrollment. The system is self-cleaning and please listen to this a little carefully. The system is self-cleaning because it is in the resident's interest to ensure that the system has correct data in absence of which he cannot authenticate his own identity. So what they will, it is through incentives and it goes on, further clean data can be insured by standardization of processes, matching and verifying information, work flow, simple and well-defined open platforms, blah, blah and penalization for non-compliance. It is through incentives that data quality can be managed rather than micromanagement of stakeholders. So it's a fascinating thing where they say, if people need to be able to use their identity as reflected in the ID system, it is up to them to clean up their own data on the system. And this links up with why people have to keep going again and again and again to the UIBAI to clean up their data. This is a self-cleaning and this is what the election commission wants to depend upon. We know that the process by which the UIBAI created its database and the process by which the election commission constantly works at keeping a good database are completely different and that the election commission takes on a responsibility and a role in the creation and continue an upgradation of that database constantly because that is its job. Its job is to make sure that people do have the right to go and that people should not be obstructed because they are told that you don't have an ID. That's also the reason why the election commission does not confine itself to only one ID being a relevant ID and there's something that you can use. It's not just the voter ID. There are a series of IDs which are government given IDs which they say can also be used as an ID for people to go and vote. Now by linking it up with the UID, they make the UID the basis for even the election time for the voter ID. So the absurdity of its kind of beats me. I can't understand why somebody who's worked so hard to create a proper electoral role will end up, you know, we'll say that okay we'll link it up and we will depend on a database that has been created without any process. You just have en-rollers who can sit anywhere to have common service centers which sometimes shut down sometimes because they're all commercial spaces and we have seen through the years, you know, starting I think from maybe one of the one of the early ones which hit the headlines was what do you call it, Dania getting a voter ID, not a voter, sorry getting en-rolled on the UID. Then you had a person in Hyderabad who's supposed to have en-rolled over 800 people as biometric exceptions except that he couldn't have done it because he had already been thrown out of his job so somebody else was using it. You have the Kanpur fraud where you found that they could also, you know, they could put things in, they could take things out, they could create IDs. You have the Rajna Khaira investigative report that was done, it goes on. It's like endless and none of these get acknowledged. Finally, we have however this Indian Express report has finally found its acknowledgement in a government document and I think we need to know, we need to see what it is that they are saying. This is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment which very recently, very about a year and some ago, they have, you know, about a year ago, they've said they're talking about, you know, the minority scholarship scheme and how that got hijacked. And they said three central sector scholarship schemes namely pre-metric, post-metric and merit come means are being implemented by the Ministry of Minority Affairs for six centrally notified minority communities. The committee, the committee are quite disturbed by cases reported about the alleged misappropriation of funds, funds going to fake students under these scholarship schemes for children belonging to underprivileged minorities in six states which are under investigation inquiry. In one state after inquiry, the fraud is stated to have happened due to passwords leaked by certain vested interests as well as other book ports. Taking advantage of illiteracy, lack of awareness among parents and children of minorities is also exploited by such elements. While the ministry representatives have always been claiming that the system is fail safe due to all transactions, verifications done online, a dedicated portal, cash transfer through DBT and similar measures which are definitely the need of the hour, it is disconcerting for the committee to observe that such instances of corruption happened. However, minuscule, this must have deprived the genuine beneficiaries of government scholarship schemes and may lead to some children dropping out to being unable to afford the school fees, other expenses. During this evidence, the ministry representatives informed the committee about further safety measures. This is last year, okay, so this is 11 years after the project started. The ministry representatives informed the committee about further safety measures under their consideration, for instance, preserving the files of scholarship for the students for a period of five years, creation of an Aadhar ball in coordination with Meti, requirement of signatures of school principles in verification, report filed by teacher, at least two persons physical verification, creation of student data bank with the help of department. So the number of things that they have to do to remedy the problem that has been created by the UID is quite stunning. And we find that, you know, there is an, this report I found was fascinating also because there is nothing that they've received from the government. There is no investigation report, there's nothing reflected in this report. So what you find is that they are looking at, you know, they are looking at newspaper reports and saying it seems this has happened and it seems that has happened, absolutely no input from the government, except saying, oh, we'll open other walls after this. So, I mean, election commission, I think needs to understand what kind of a system it is that they are dealing with. Now we, you know, let's just look at two other quick, you know, two other reports quickly. You find that Mr. Rijiju had said that actually, some standing committees had already okayed the linking of UID with voter ID. So why are people complaining now? Now when you go and look at what is this place where they, where they are supposed to have said, okay, you find that this is report number 101 and report number 105 in 2020, in March and September 2020 on the demand for grants. Now in the 101 report, they are talking about the election commission having launched that 2015 purification authentication program to weed out bogus voters by using unique ID Aadhar number, which has to be, which had to be suspended because of the Putta Swami case. And then they go on to say the commission has approached the law ministry for appropriate legislative backup for which amendment to the representation of the people at 1950 and the other act 2016 is necessary. By this process, there would be an, this is significant too. By this process, there would be an inclusion to the privacy of the individual. But the objective of purifying electoral role will serve the public interest. That's it. No other explanation offered for why privacy should be given a go by. And it's important, I think, here to just pause for a minute and see that, you know, privacy means different things in different places. The most significant thing in terms of privacy, I mean, at this point, I would think are two, one element or three, one element of privacy is that you should be able to reflect yourself as you are. And if that gets taken away, that is also a violation of privacy. So if I'm not able to say, if I go there, if I come to and say, I'm sure, and you say, no, you're not sure at all, that's actually a violation of my privacy, if I can't establish who I am. The other thing is that this is about the secret ballot. I would have thought that in all this consideration that they have, they say free and fair election, that it should be a secret ballot should be one of the most significant. And the moment you link this up to the UID. And at this point, I mean, I'll just read the last line of this and move on to that. It says here, it was therefore pleaded that the purported invasion of privacy may be permitted for linking voter ID card with Aadhar number. Now these are not permissions that the government can give, these are constitutional protections. So here you have a threat to the secret ballot. And the third thing is that it's not, the moment the voter ID is going to tell the UID, UID AI, that this is the person who we are looking to authenticate. UID AI then has that information. And that number, the person that number holder will find, because you have no choice today, they have to put their number in various databases. All of us know what is being done with us. So they have to be in multiple databases. And linking these, I mean, this idea of convergence, Rahul Mathan, who otherwise supports the project, the only thing he concedes, and this was also the first try legal report, was where he said that convergence of data can happen. And that's something that should be watched against. AP Singh, Mr. AP Singh, when he came to the Delhi School of Social Work, and when we had a discussion on this at that time, he said, the rest I'm not sure about, but convergence, it is true, will definitely happen. So we are talking about punishing people if they are not going to be voting the way you wanted to be, knowing about people in the first instance, huge possibility of manipulation, because you know so much, the government knows so much about all of these things. One question that could be asked is why do you say that the government knows nothing, this is the UIDIA, and that it's an independent agency. But when we look at the other act of 2016, we find that the government controls the UIDIA. The government under that law has the power to give directives to the UIDIA. And if the UIDIA does not follow its directives, it can take it over for six months at a time. So we are really talking about an extraordinary kind of thing in that law. And so for the election commission to say that they will bank on something that is entirely controlled by the central government is a very strange position in which we find ourselves. I think it's also useful to look at other provisions of the other act. I'll mention only one more, which is section five. Now if you look at section five, if you look at section five, it says special measures for issuance of other number for certain category of persons. The authority shall take special measures to issue other numbers to women, children, senior citizens, persons with disability, unskilled and unorganized workers, nomadic rights, or for such other persons who do not have any permanent dwelling house, and such other categories of individuals as may be specified by regulations. This provision was an indication of all those who the UIDIA recognized even then are likely to have difficulty in getting enrolled. And then you have a problem in 2019, they had to say, okay, if your biometrics don't work, if you're not able to authenticate yourself, then locally they should deal with it. This is a system that has admitted that it doesn't know what has happened. I'll refer to only one more document and then we can come back to it later. And I'm forgetting what the document first wanted to refer to, it came to my head and moved out immediately. But so let me move to the last thing that I want to say, which is that the UIDIAI, and this again is said by Mr. AP Singh at that other 2.0 meeting, where he says that there was magic that was created by the project and that magic play in 3 numbers. And those 3 were Jandan, Adhaar and Mobile. He said these 3 linked together can produce magic. And he says we have already created the system which houses the magic. Now it's for the UIDIAI to make sure that this magic is actually realized, which is basically to say that these 3 numbers put together will identify people in various ways, which will allow for various businesses to be built on the personal data that can be acquired through these 3 numbers. The UIDIAI, the election voter ID does not require all this kind of information. Voter ID requires that it's only about ID and saying where you can go. That's it. So there are two arguments, I mean two things that they say that one is deduplication and the other is about migrants being able to work. Now on deduplication, there is no evidence that they give you at all to say what is the extent of duplicates that they have noticed. What is the difficulty that they have in the other systems that they have in place for them to be able to deal with deduplication. I mean is there a duplicates, isn't the system that they are doing also producing some kind of result, is there no other way by which you can do it. Because in the violation of a fundamental right, one of the principles of proportionality is that you do not violate it. You put instance right to privacy, you will not violate it. You won't violate it unless you simply have to and it will be to the minimum that you need. Here they haven't even said what the extent of the problem is and if they don't know the extent of the problem then they have no actually no right at all, no constitutional right to use this. The second thing is when they talk about migrants, so actually there is no evidence on deduplication and I think we really, really need to demand some kind of information on this because the same thing happened with fan clubs. They just said and that was it. There was no need for them to establish anything more. On migrants, they say that of course Mr. Nelligini in a recent interview on this new book has said, oh you know the migrants they go to the cities and then they are not able to vote there. They just have to vote there and change their address and then they'll be able to go and vote you know where they are staying there. So it's a very glib way of treating this and of course the easiest thing according to them is that you can change the address at any time. So I'm not sure what kind of a protection that that provides to ensure that you're a voter. Maybe I mean I'll be a voter somewhere one month, somewhere else the next month depending on where the elections are. So it's a very strange and skewed way of looking at this but apart from that if they decide that they are going to use biometrics as part of their authentication mechanism, then two things to remember. One, in 2019 when they started talking about one nation, one nation, letters were sent around, there was a circulator. I have a copy of the Dupura letter where they say that there are a series of people. So they say you know people above 60 people below 15 people who are disabled people who can't move, various kinds of, if there is only a one-member family then you find that you know they may not be able to authenticate themselves with the fingerprint. So they can actually nominate a person who will then give their biometrics on behalf of the person themselves. It's a it this is another very strange kind of thing where my identity will be determined on the basis of somebody else's biometrics. Now this ought not to surprise us because when questions started getting asked and they were the UIDA found itself in a tight corner in 2014-15 up to you know 2015-16 from the time of the August 11th order till the dog got fast, they said that they were setting up something called the UBCC which is UIDAI Biometric Centre of Competence. And the logic for that was that the nature and diversity of India's working population makes biometrics a challenge. And then we thought okay maybe they set something up, maybe they got some kind of you know maybe some report something. We actually found when we ferreted that not a single penny, not a single rupee, not a single paisad had been spent on setting this up. So it was you know they recognized the problem, they knew they didn't want to be questioned, they wanted needed an answer if they were questioned and at the end of it when nothing happened they passed a law where they said we will share everything other than biometrics. So the biometric database as is the demographic database, these are completely unaudited systems and these are known to be full of evidence. This is the database with which the election commission wants to link the voter act. Just think about what that means, there is a whole lot else which I just thought of some of this and set this up. Thanks Parmini. Thank you Vishyaji. So I had a question in regards to what does one do in the face of this, right? Like much of the work that we're doing at one board is about making the citizen conscious of these developments and these shortcomings and issues. But what can citizens actually do in terms of taking action in order to kind of push against these developments because we're seeing over the YouTube channel there is a lot of there's a lot of faith in the EVM as because it's technology and people feel as a technology to be exact and correct and therefore not at fault. So how do we, what kind of instruments can we use to kind of take action and make push against this? I think the kind of thing that we need to do in relation to EVMs may be different from what we need to do in terms of the voter ID and UID link. For this reason that EVMs are something that people encounter only during an election. It's only those who are working on it who are aware of what kind of problems there could be. It's only someone who understands how software gets used in these systems who will have questions about, who will know how to ask the questions about it. It's only someone who understands the nature of the source code who will be able to tell us what these issues are. So in the popular imagination, how you question a technology of this nature, so it's not that clear. It becomes a little clearer when we find that there are other countries in the world which have rejected it. Which countries you believe, in all of us commonly believe, believe in technology. So if they are saying no to it, then what are we missing? So that could be one kind of question. But on the voter ID, UID link, I find that actually people are just feeling pressured and pushed into a corner because unlike the EVM, in the UID, everyone is being honored into trying to work the system again. If you look at the J-PAL report, you know, that Karthik Murli, the Ren's report, you find that they say that a large number of families are able to link their UID with the PDES because at least one of their fingerprints work. So if there's a family of five and there's one person whose fingerprint works, they are saying, okay, at least we're able to link So it's a deeply defective system and people are experiencing it. I was actually very surprised at the recent feeding which I attended on digitization where I found that every person coming from the different sectors, whether it's labor or it is banking or it is agriculture or whatever, all of the food work, everybody, you know, they would say, for instance, on the Social Security Code that all unemployed or unorganized workers, everyone has to get on to that database. So they say, okay, you get on to the database, to do that, you have to give your UID, then they want your backup number, then they want your PAN, then they want you to keep reporting to them about where you are and all this has to be done through technology. And at the end of this and throughout from 2010 till now, there has been no hiding. Even the UIDA hasn't hidden this that fingerprints are a problem for migrant workers. Biometrics are a problem for migrant workers. So this is slightly different for that reason that there are so many, people have just fallen off the map and nobody is even counting them in. People go to the ration shops every month and find themselves in trouble. So I think, you know, with its helplessness and choicelessness that is pushing people to happen. They are not going it because they expect the system to work. They just know that they will be excluded if they don't somehow try to include themselves. That's the cruelty of the system. But that also makes it easier for people to understand. All right. Thank you so much. I think we have a question in the chat. So what is the unique aspect of India's rule of law that makes the creation of this kind of citizen database possible in a state of exception? See, I think we need to apportion some of that responsibility among different agencies. I think one of the things is that in the, okay, this is just my way of reading it, that it is correct that the state has a responsibility to make sure that everybody has what they need, not just to survive, but to be able to move on in life. Which means that if I'm in a PDA system today, you know, five years or 10 years down the line, I should not need to be in that PDA system. If I have been below poverty line for a certain period of time, I should have been able to move out of the poverty line. I'm not sure we are calculating. We are looking at it. We are looking at trying to somehow make the system work, but we are not looking at what it will mean to get, so in my head, freedom from the state. And this does not in the libertarian sense, but freedom from the state in terms of not having them piss me with, you know, with UAPA or with, whether I'm a minority or not or whether it's whatever, that is a very important freedom. And it's a freedom that we have lost in large measure, because we have participated, we have allowed ourselves to lose this, which means that, you know, people will often ask, have you all, have you got yourself a mobile phone and ask, you know, they'll say, but how will you operate without it? I'm like, where is the problem? Is the problem that I don't have a mobile phone or is it a problem that the system will not allow anyone to operate without? And do you know the number of people in this country who don't have mobile phones? And if they're going to be maintaining that, the artifact becomes more important than what they need to get on in life. Isn't there a problem there? So I think in our, there is a way, I keep saying this, but, you know, it's a strange thing that in this country, which taught the world non-cooperation, we are the most obedient that you can find, which is why when people say we need systems like this so that, you know, there won't be anarchy, I can only laugh. Where is the anarchy? We are just much too obedient. It is, I mean, that is a problem. I don't even mean it, you know, I mean, there's a certain liberty, of course, in that, but it is meant in seriousness too, because if something is wrong, it's wrong. You know, when Gandhi refused to follow this tradition, you know, he said, the sedition law is bad. What I'm doing is not bad. The sedition law is right. I can't obey. If I obey it, then I'm obeying something that I know is bad. How can I do that?