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Aadhaar survives

Survived a fierce legal challenge
4/5 Judges: the project empowers marginalised sections
August 24, 2017: Privacy is a fundamental right
People who opposed Aadhdar: a grand project to harvest personal data for commercial exploitation by private parties and profiling by the state.
Govt: it is essentially a transformative scheme primarily aimed at reaching benefits and subsidies to the poor and the marginalised.
Aim of Aadhaar as considered by SC: to plug leakages in subsidy schemes and to have better targeting of welfare benefits.
The judgment narrows the scope of Aadhaar but provides a framework within which it can work.
Aadhaar important for: welfare benefits, subsidies and money spent from the Consolidated Fund of India.
Declared unconstitutional: seeding mobile and bank account number.
99.76% of people included under it. Birth and death certificates SIM cards School admissions Property registrations Vehicle purchases
“The remedy is to plug the loopholes rather than axe the project,” the Bench said.
Section 7, which enables the use of Aadhaar to avail of any government subsidy, benefit or service for which expenditure is incurred out of the Consolidated Fund of India.
Hence it was termed as a Money Bill
The majority opinion has looked at the larger picture.
It held that the Aadhaar Act passes the “triple test” laid down in the ‘Privacy’ judgment under which there ought to be a law, a legitimate state interest and an element of proportionality in any law that seeks to abridge the right of privacy.
In his dissent, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud argued that the Rajya Sabha’s authority has been superseded and that this “constitutes a fraud on the Constitution”
Biometric authentication failures that have led to denial of rights and legal entitlements.

Opacity in the name of privacy

August 24, 2017: Supreme Court declared the right to privacy a fundamental right.
RIGHT to PRIVACY: protect citizens from arbitrary state and corporate surveillance
Fear: it might be deployed first and foremost to shield authorities from scrutiny by citizens.
The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, drafted by the Srikrishna Committee, confirms these concerns.
The Bill identifies “personal data” as any data that directly or indirectly identifies a person.
It then calls for amending clause 8.1.j of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. “information which relates to personal information, the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the Public Information Officer… is satisfied that the larger public interest justifies the disclosure. Provided that the information which cannot be denied to the Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person.”
PIOs with discretion.
RTI Act’s core aim: bring accountability
2 nd aim: “containing corruption”
Girish Deshpande v. Central Information Commission & Ors. (2012): favored PIOs
Recently, the Union Department of Personnel and Training denied information about the mere number of IAS officers whose annual performance appraisal reports were pending, as of 2017.
According to Central Information Commissioner M. Sridhar Acharyulu PIOs’ “misuse of 8.1.j is rampant”, and is reducing RTI to “a mockery.”
The Ministry of Information Technology is accepting public feedback on the Data Privacy Bill until the end of September. Citizens should use this window to urge the government not to amend the RTI Act.

Cutting through the white noise

- The cancellation last week of the meeting between EAMs has not fundamentally changed much on the ground.

PM Modi’s phone call to Mr Khan for victory in polls.
Delegation from Pakistan attending funeral of Atalji
The verbal fisticuffs
Army Chief General Bipin Rawat “second surgical strike”
Pakistani army said it is a nuclear power nation
Both civil and military ties in gridlock
The one channel on the Modi government’s watch that has proven resilient is that of National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval with his former Pakistani counterpart, Nasser Khan Janjua.
From November 2015 to June 2018, when he resigned due to elections, General Janjua and Mr. Doval carried on a consistent engagement, spoke over the telephone regularly to smooth over crises, and discreetly met more than half a dozen times in various places around the world.Low-hanging fruit
If the two countries can again decide on interlocutors, the points for discussion are many.
Visa-free Kartarpur corridor for Sikh pilgrims to travel to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib for the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak in November 2019.
Mr. Khan has spoken about trade ties being a good opener for substantive talks.
Visas for journalists
When it comes to protecting the 2003 ceasefire, it is possible for this channel to consider reinforcing the fencing at the IB and LoC with a second fence on both sides, or a demilitarised zone of the sort that has withstood the Korean conflict.

I was raped at 16 and I kept silent

One in four girls and one in six boys today will be sexually abused before the age of 18.
I am speaking now because I want us all to fight so that our daughters never know this fear and shame and our sons know that girls’ bodies do not exist for their pleasure and that abuse has grave consequences.
Those messages should be very clear as we consider whom we appoint to make decisions on the highest court of our land.
“If anybody touches you in your privates or makes you feel uncomfortable, you yell loud. You get out of there and tell somebody. Nobody is allowed to put their hands on you. Your body is yours.”

Important News

SC proceedings can be live-streamed
“Live-streaming of court proceedings has the potential of throwing up an option to the public to witness proceedings which they otherwise could not have due to logistical issues and infrastructural restrictions,”
Centre hikes import duty on select goods
MHA merges police forces in six Union Territories
The initiative which, according to the MHA, has been in the works for over a year and a half, is being viewed as the first step towards the creation of a central police cadre allowing for the posting of police personnel across the country irrespective of the force they are initially inducted into.
Ordinance allows panel to supersede scam-tainted MCI
In a move to enhance governance and quality of medical education, an ordinance was issued on Wednesday, dissolving the Medical Council of India (MCI) and replacing it with a seven-member Board of Governors led by NITI Aayog Member Dr. V.K. Paul.
A Bill to replace the MCI with a National Medical Commission is pending in Parliament.
The Bill provides for simplification of procedures and is aimed at spurring rapid growth in the number of undergraduate and postgraduate medical seats in the country. – Rare sighting The INS Chakra II, an Akula-class Russian nuclear-powered submarine, returning after a sortie on Wednesday to its base in the Eastern Naval Command in Visakhapatnam. It was leased from Russia to train Indian submariners to handle the indigenous nuclear-powered INS Arihant-class submarines.
Recyclers storing electronic waste hazardously: Environment Ministry
While some are storing it in hazardous conditions, others don’t even have the capacity to handle such waste, says a new report prepared by the Union Environment Ministry.
India generates more than two million tonnes of e-waste annually, and the bulk of it is processed in the informal sector.
Record kharif foodgrains production expected
India’s foodgrains production is estimated at a record 141.59 million tonnes (MT) in the kharif season of 2018-19 crop year, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said on Wednesday.
Boost to SC/ST quota in promotions
Yameen trying to hold on to power, says Opposition
G-4 for UN Security Council reform, multilateralism
India and other Group-4 (G-4) countries reaffirmed their commitment to multilateralism and called for the early reform of the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Tuesday.
India, Brazil, Japan and Germany
New telecom policy aims to provide broadband access to all citizens by 2022
The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the new telecom policy that aims to provide broadband access to every citizen at 50 Mbps speed by the year 2022.
The National Digital Communications Policy 2018, which envisions attracting $100 billion investments into the country’s digital communications sector, aims at creating at least 40 lakh new jobs in the sector in the next four years.