[Reader-list] Rahul Gandhi to be guest of honour at workshop on NREGA- 204

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear Ram,

There is no special reasons for posting these stories, except that the
Government of India is planning a scheme to provide a number to all
Indians and subsequently create a database where personal
identification information pertaining to all Indians will be stored.
Such a database will work as a base resource for distribution of goods
and services meant for the needy and it will also provide a valid
proof of an individual's identity.

The assumption in such an exercises is- that the GOI KNOWS who all
INDIANS are and that GOI can assert WHO-IS-WHO truthfully. I find
these assumptions problematic, therefore, I thought it would be
interesting to track the story of giving identity numbers and
measuring individual identity of all Indians on the sarai reader-list
because it is an issue which pertains to all of us and therefore it is
just as good that we all could think and talk about it collectively on
a public forum like a reader list.

In this regard you may want to have a look at postings, conversations,
exchanges, assertions and rebuttals on this topic in the past one year
of so. All this stuff is available at the Sarai reader-list archives-
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/

Posts  have been published regularly since last November  but if you
are more interested then I would urge to see postings made
particularly by Shuddhabarata Sengupta and others on the emerging
culture of surveillance and information society in India. These
posting were made on the reader-list at the beginning of this decade
during 2001-02.

We do not know what exactly will exactly happen because it is an
ongoing process, but at the same time we hope that enough debate gets
generated so that we could at least reason out aloud the various
issues enveloping the imminent proposal for distribution of national
identity cards and national identity numbers.

Warm regards

Taha