Thread by @Orionis57

What a trite puff piece for your friend Nandan Nilekani.
That it is completely devoid of facts & the realities of suffering at the ground level is not surprising.
Would you write the same if your family had to climb trees to get their entitlements?
Shame @nytimes
Thread 1/n

'@tomfriedman @nytopinion @nytimes will you ask American citizens to "travel around 3 km (~1.9 miles) to reach higher grounds or hilltops to access network so that PoS machine can work".
And remember this is on foot, not in your gas guzzling SUV
hindustantimes.com/jaipur/no-netw…

1. The same BJP that you say has "impressively energized the Aadhaar project" was vehemently opposing this project.
A. The current Prime Minister said that your friend's project was a national security risk.
B. In their election manifesto, the BJP promised to scrap this project.

1 contd. So "energized" was the PM & his party that they abandoned parliamentary procedure to pass the Act governing Aadhaar as a "Money Bill" so that the Upper House of Parliament could be bypassed.
The matter is now in limbo in the Supreme Court of India
thehansindia.com/posts/index/Ci…

2. You state that this scheme has been a revolution because "many poor people lacked any form of ID". However, as per a "Right to Information" query, 99.97% of people who enrolled in Aadhaar did it on the basis of existing ID documents.
thewire.in/3108/most-aadh…

3. You say that this scheme will stop " bureaucrats, bankers or postal workers skim off 30%". It will do nothing of the sort. A large majority of Indians are still illiterate. It is very easy to con people stating that authentication has failed and divert their rations / funds.

4. You say that opening a bank account has been a revolution. It is - for fraudsters. A telecom operator fraudulently & without customer consent created "payment bank" accounts for its mobile subscribers & diverted their govt subsidies to these accounts.
ecoti.in/TmP_SY

4 contd. Number of subscribers impacted 2.3 million. Total value of govt subsidy transferred in the fraudulently opened accounts ~$7.2 million.
@tomfriedman @nytopinion @nytimes Would you allow such fraudulent transfer without consent in the US?
ecoti.in/TmP_SY

5. Meanwhile thanks to your friend, fraudsters are having a field day at the expense of the poor, the old & the technologically challenged.
This 👇is not an isolated instance - their are several such instances of people losing money due to such frauds
newindianexpress.com/states/telanga…

6. "Distinction of “having reached one billion users the fastest"
From what was originally conceived as an ID to reduce corruption in transfer of welfare benefits, Indians are now being FORCED to link this scam ID to their banks, mobiles, ration cards, meals for poor school kids

6 contd If your life depended on govt provided rations or wages & u were threatened that you would lose these rations / wages unless you obtained Aadhaar, wouldn't you obtain it?
This coercion is what accounts for the "distinction of having reached one billion users the fastest"

7. All the productivity gains and money saved are fictitious numbers that the govt has repeatedly bandied without being able to substantiate.
A. The Comptroller & Auditor General identified that 92% of the gas subsidy savings were due to falling oil prices & not due to Aadhaar

7B. The PM lied to parliament about the number of duplicate / fake ration cards identified as a result of Aadhaar.

7C. As per "right to information" queries, the govt has no information on savings due to Aadhaar.
As per the Department of Food it doesn't even know how many of the cancelled cards are due to Aadhaar or other reasons.
"DoFPD is not making any discretion … on account of…" 👇

7D. In MGNREGA, a large welfare scheme, which guarantees 100 days of wage-employment in a year for unskilled manual work, the govt's response on the amount saved and the methodology for the calculation make for tragic reading.

8. "It’s transforming the lives of ordinary people" - actually it is destroying the life of ordinary people.
Please go through this elaborately documented thread about "real", "ordinary" people (not the champagne set)

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8 contd. "While Aadhaar coverage speed has been exemplary, ..., some states report authentication failures: estimates include 49% failure rates for Jharkhand, 37% for Rajasthan"
If a scheme deprived 50% of the citizens of the US, would you still be writing these puff pieces?

8 contd. Disabled boy denied pension as your friend's machines can't read his fingerprints
“Akhilesh is unable to move his hands, legs or any other organ of his body. We tried our best but his Aadhaar could not be made"
dailypioneer.com/state-editions…

8 contd. "Around 50,000 senior citizens have not received their pensions for the past few months owing to the Centre’s UID-bank account syncing glitches"
punemirror.indiatimes.com/pune/cover-sto…

8 contd. 8.5 million Aadhaar numbers have been deactivated since 2010, without notice and in the absence of proper grievance redressal.
If this happened to you would it be acceptable?
scroll.in/article/831939…

8 contd. "the cruellest joke on your system, tells the beneficiary that her biometric has failed, even when he gets a positive authentication"
Source: m.deccanherald.com/articles.php?n…

8 contd. "Banks mess up Aadhaar entry, relief delayed to 40,000 farmers"
m.timesofindia.com/city/bengaluru…

8 contd. "Denied food because she did not have Aadhaar-linked ration card, Jharkhand girl dies of starvation"
amp.scroll.in/article/854225…

8 contd. "Leprosy erases their food source in Andhra Pradesh. Affected people denied rations as they do not have fingerprints to scan".
thehindu.com/news/cities/Vi…

8 contd. @tomfriedman your friend must be really proud of this one
Why Aadhaar is prompting HIV positive people to drop out of treatment programmes across India
amp.scroll.in/article/857656…

8 contd. Aadhaar, a problem for women seeking abortions - The woman could not undergo an ultra sonography (USG) as she could not furnish her Aadhaar card.
dnaindia.com/india/report-a…

8 contd. "During the seeding, over ten lakh pensioners were removed from the government’s lists, written off for dead. Many of them were later found to be alive but their pensions had been stopped."

9. @tomfriedman did your friend tell you that for several years his grandiose scheme operated in a grey area of the law, and when finally a law was enacted it was against the common citizen?
As per the Aadhaar act, no citizen can lodge a complaint even if his data is leaked

9. @tomfriedman did your friend tell you that the govt of India's lawyer told India's Supreme Court that privacy is not a fundamental right and that privacy is only an elitist right in developed countries.
Would you dare tell this to American citizens?

10. When common Indian citizens and those social activists who were actually working in the field with India's poor reported their concerns, this is how your friend reacted. 👇
I've never heard Gates, Pichai, Nadella ever talk of their opponents in such "glowing" terms

10 contd. The UIDAI, the Aadhaar regulator, filed a case against a blogger who exposed that Aadhaar had very poor security and that storing the unencrypted biometric along with the Aadhaar number on the application allowed for replay attacks.
indianexpress.com/article/india/…

10 contd. The UIDAI, filed a complaint against a journalist who reported that it was possible to obtain two sets of Aadhaar enrolment numbers with the same biometrics and with fake documents
thewire.in/119578/aadhaar…

10 contd "Aadhaar data of all 230 million beneficiaries of Direct Benefit Transfer schemes could be publicly available, says a report by Centre for Internet and Society."
UIDAI has now termed this as an instance of illegal access by the researchers.
scroll.in/article/837717…

In conclusion. Nothing can say it better than this 👇