vaibahv wasnik’s comment on this pic: and these are going to be life givers. they hate 85 percent of the country, the sc/st/obcs so much that they cannot even tolerate people from these communities as co-doctors. how can these be expected to treat the illnesses of these same people.
kuffir, calls this picture “the ordinary faces of hate.”
i recently read an academic paper which was laboring to make a point about UN recognizing caste as a race issue and trying to decipher the relation and difference between race and caste. this is what this picture made me write “caste is not a sibling of race, it is not even the parent, it is the God of all forms of discriminations.” just look at those women’s faces, there is no hate, there is only a supreme conviction of righteousness, such pure dharmic expressions. who needs conical masks and nooses, who needs to disguise hate that is so pure that it does not even require the face to contort into a negative expression.
Indian society with all its complex variation of lived realities will be excel sheeted into a sanitized, digitized, very middleclass, database version through the UID number. How many Indians deviate from this ‘normal’ table should be the concern of this agency (UIDA). For it has the task of assigning citizenship status to ALL Indians. And let me not forget to add, at the cost of $40 billion.
These are the core deliverables of a citizenship identification program from the point of view of the individual citizen.
Now, please watch this documentary for one group of Indians who deviate from the prescribed forms of identification parameters with respect to the data elements. The required data elements to be filled out to obtain UID numbers, are given in the table below.
These were female children abducted from far off places and sold into the sex trade. At this point it is not clear to me how this group will be included into the UID program without ambiguity. That is, how will it serve the primary question -do I exist- for this group of Indian women?
Will the state apparatus go to them and fill out the data elements, if so, how is it going to do it? Use the police, NGO, activists network? How long will this take?
Or will these young women self identify to gain the benefits of UID number, that is a beginning of sorts for better services and rights? If either of these does happen, will their digitized information be safe? What are the safeguards for this information from becoming vulnerable to more agencies in addition to the exploitative ones that these women are already exposed to? That is, if I exist now as a number with all my personal details filled out, where I live, what I work as, etc. visible in the card/database, am I safe or is it safe?
See how such a simple data filling exercise falls apart in this specific instance. The ? mark against the data element refers to data that is not likely to be verifiable and + sign indicates those that can be.
Status in family –Head of family/not head of family…………?
POB (place of birth)…………..?
Premise Address …………….?
Photo. …….. +
Finger print…….. +
Visual identification mark……… +
Signature………. +
Current marital status……….?
Education qualification…………?
Occupation category…………..?
Title ……….?
Of the 24 plus data elements, 7 data elements can be filled unambiguously either by the state or by the individual.
All other elements, by their very nature for this specific group of women are not available as reliable data.
The name, date of birth, place of birth, fathers name and mothers name if known would and should have been used to relocate the girls back to their families.
Will the agencies record their information in the absence of documentary evidence?
Study these specific dataelements in the context of these women:
Occupation: This data element has already been finalized and codes have been assigned for the UID for most jobs. However, sex worker unions have been waging a losing battle to have this profession legalized. So what is going to be filled here?
Address: The documentary gives visual proof of the kind of temporary hovels they are likely to reside in. Will it be recognized?
Relationship to head of the family: Who will that be? The pimp, the brothel owner?
Marital status: What?
Of the data elements that can be filled; gender, photo, fingerprint, physical identification marks and signature are actually the biometric data, literally proof that a person is alive, nothing more. And this is the only data that is going to be available for a large number of Indians who find themselves as stateless trafficked humans involved in slave labour. For those who would like to say that these women and men are miniscule percentage of the population, I would like to remind them that they are also paying for this mammoth project. The tax that they pay on salt, dhal, clothes contribute to the funding of this project. So kindly hold that line.
On a personal note, I would also like to reawaken the deadened empathy of such argument profferers –these girls/women were beloved children of parents, they are Indian daughters, their rights are not be relegated to some arbitrary or representative numbers of exploitation/trade as against any other larger or smaller numbers of categorized Indians.
Since the data elements are designed for the imagined ideal Indian, the data can be filled quite easily by the middleclass, with ‘normal’ families with access to institutions such as education, ‘respectable’ employment and marriage. So, for the already citizenship-rights accessing Indians, this is indeed a better system and seems like the best solution for the tiresome multiple identification systems. The -am I safe question- for this class has more to do with credit or identity thefts, which is a significant valid concern. However it becomes even more worrisome, for the marginalized whose meager savings/earnings are also susceptible to the same fears. They have nothing else to fall back on.
Do I exist? Will remain the basic question, while the am I safe questions will immediately materialize as soon the system recognizes the existence of the marginalized, and be ever ready to derail them further away from seeking their aspirations, without built-in protections especially designed for them.
I hope to elaborate on the individual marginalized safety questions arising out of digitization, and reflect on their group/caste/geography, then, dwell on the bigger concerns of safety of such citizen’s information. While all the time never being sure of what specific benefits are really gained for the marginalized by the UID. Whereas for the IT component of middleclass Indians there is an immediate and definite benefit in terms of jobs and unending contracts.
Until the activists and civil liberties groups have clear cut answers from the UIDA as to how the marginalized are going to be included in this system and provided safety, the UID program has to be seen as the BPO/IT industry’s very smart switching of ‘outsourcing’ from other countries to making the government of India and its citizens its largest ‘insourced’ assignment.
In India you can by accident of birth be a criminal at birth. In India you can be severely malnourished, be forced to catch rats and eat them and be labelled -rat eaters. In India we will spend $ 40 billion to uniquely identify its citizens and everybody wants a piece of the pie.
Will the marginalized be identified by the UID? Will this magic number hinge them to the nation as Indian citizens and allow them to start the long trek to gain full citizenship rights; to food, wages, education, health, services and protection?
As India’s new cabinet was sworn in, the biggest applause was reserved for one of its youngest members, Agatha Sangma, who is all of 28.
She was among several young faces who were brought into government by the Congress party to inject a sense of freshness and energy after its resounding poll victory.
But every single one of them belongs to political families.
Political nepotism appears to be a trend that isn’t abating but seemingly spreading beyond the influential Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to a handful of clans across India.
So the formation of the new cabinet was held up because the chief of the southern Dravida Munnetra Khazagam (DMK) party wanted posts for his children and members of his extended family.
Even the smaller parties are often family fiefdoms with parents handing over the reins to their children.
1 a: government by the people ; especially : rule of the majority
b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2: a political unit that has a democratic government and
4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges
This is the reason you feign ignorance, and court denial but mostly some of you are seeking out these images, if not, how would you feel superior, kind, generous and continue doing the myriad good deeds to save the world?
While enjoying the rush of satisfaction on seeing this image, you can go ahead and forget that some of those under the table types have moved out, who know exactly how learned and kind you are. And they know how different you are from those two men at the table. But do keep in mind they have better things to do than educate you out of your real ignorance.
A decade back, Goldemberg wrote about the flawed vision of the technical elite of developing countries; their fancy view of themselves, what they achieved (and did not) and the irrelevance of what they pushed for.
Their approaches were distanced from the local problems, wrecked the environment (social, political and natural), pushed the poor further down and successfully set up nonsensical specialization centers. All this was and is done with the complete confidence that their actions will never be scrutinized and held accountable. In fact this group demands respect that they have been able to promote narrow irrelevant science and technology. Hiding behind qualifications and training used largely to extend kinship base in the establishments that were set up, they deserve the sycophancy they seek.
Here is the article from the series ‘Essay on Science and Society’, in the Science Journal written in 1998.
After the Second World War, a small technical elite arose in developing countries such as India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Iraq who had been educated as scientists in the industrialized world. They thought that by pushing for Manhattan project-type enterprises in nuclear energy, electronics, pharmaceuticals, or space research they could leapfrog the dismally low level of development of their countries. India, for example, started a nuclear energy program that mobilized thousands of technicians and cost hundreds of millions of dollars but failed to meet power demands.
What my scientist colleagues and national leaders alike failed to understand was that development does not necessarily coincide with the possession of nuclear weapons or the capability to launch satellites. Rather, it requires modern agriculture, industrial systems, and education. The technical elite naïvely believed that spin-offs from their nuclear energy or space programs would somehow convert their countries to 20th-century industrialized states. Instead, there were heavy economic and political costs. In India, for example, such programs led to the development of nuclear weapons–which only encouraged Pakistan to do the same–while many basic human needs such as health and education were not given the support needed.
In my view, this scenario means that we in developing countries should not expect to follow the research model that led to the scientific enterprise of the United States and elsewhere. Rather, we need to adapt and develop technologies appropriate to our local circumstances, help strengthen education, and expand our roles as advisers in both government and industry. In this way, we can prevent the brain-drain that results when scientists are not in touch with the problems of their home countries or when they face indifference–and poor financial support–from their governments.
Three models for the relationship between science and development.
In Brazil, the use of ethanol as fuel is one example of how this approach can work.1 By encouraging the wide use of ethanol produced from sugarcane–a traditional crop in the country–as fuel to replace gasoline, the government of Brazil was able replace half of the gasoline used by automobiles in the country (about 200,000 barrels of ethanol per day) with a renewable energy source. In so doing, Brazil became a pioneer in an area that had been neglected by industrialized countries. The entire technology, from the agricultural to the industrial phase, was developed or improved upon by local scientists and technologists. I and other Brazilian scientists first had to convince the government that this approach was technically feasible, even though it had been ignored in industrialized countries. To do this, we had to address questions regarding motor technology, environmental concerns, and the trade-off between raising crops for food versus fuel.
In general, the misconceptions held by the technical elite are derived from an idea cherished by many in the developing world that pure research leads to technological development and then to products that open new markets or conquer existing ones (see figure, model A). This naïve “linear theory” or “cradle-to-grave” approach to science and development served as the blueprint for the establishment of the National Science Foundation in the United States and was widely copied throughout the world.2 But that model fails to stress the interaction that should occur among the phases. As one moves from pure research to technological development and then to production and marketing, unanticipated problems arise that require reexamination and adaptation at the earlier stages.
More realistic are models B and C.3 Model B corresponds, generally speaking, to present practices in the United States, where some overlap exists between the successive stages. Model C illustrates the Japanese practice of having the three phases completely superimposed. These are the more realistic models that developing countries should follow. In models B and C, practical needs–that is, demand–influence supply, namely, the type of pure research that is done. For example, after solid-state devices such as transistors made possible the expansion of switchboarding in telephone services, industrial laboratories such as Bell Laboratories lavishly financed solid-state physics. In developing countries, government goals and the “demand side” pull are often lacking. As a result, universities and research centers have become isolated from the rest of the country in an ivory tower, more connected to research centers in Europe or the United States than to the obvious needs of industry, agriculture, and education in their own countries. Science and technology budgets receive little support from the private sector and instead depend on the national treasury.4 Heavy government bureaucracies wind up cultivating whatever science and technology is fashionable in the developed countries, waiting indefinitely for the time when such competence would trigger development in a manner that resembles the wait for Godot in Beckett’s play. More.
With great curiosity I read an excerpt of Nandan Nilekeni’s post on Blogbharti. I was quite sure that if I read the entire post, there would be more than a rant against local governance; the beloved India shining chief would have something to say about how our security forces can keep up with the technology curve to beat the cyber criminals and internet savvy gunmen sometime in future, perhaps? The first thing that caught my eye on his blog was the title of his new book ‘Imagining India’ with a sub heading which justifies my expectation, it reads like this “Ideas for a new century”.
But I didn’t get past the first paragraph of the post, that is, get past Nandan’s deep longing for a Rudi Giuliani type as Mumbai’s mayor. Anyone read the whole thing and got enlightened??
