Well, today I spent wandering in the Sub Collector Office regarding the issuing of voter card. I was a story on that.
Degrading state of affair of Photo ID card in Sambalpur SDO office. The Photo Id card whch has been applied by the prospective voters or eligible voters whose identity are in an orphan stage. Long live Democracy.
When I went there, the site was unpleasant and obnoxious. With help my my friend Sangram Kesar panda, I managed to go and see for myself the ruins of the old building that couldn't bear the burden of sorry state file scatters here and there...nothing in apple pie order. I also met some of the fellow victim like me who were also looking out of for their identity crisis.
When you witness something like this, it's natural to get into a contemplative mode. Well, I too had my set of realisations. I kept wondering throughout the shoot as to who was to blame. Was it the greed of a few men who wanted to make some extra bucks by making rooms on a building which was already on its last legs? Or is it because of the in-built corruption in our system that ensures that authorities turn blind eye to illegal activities like this? In the office where everyone is passing bucks on each other.... no one is accountable...When asked " saab Kahan Gare hain "....Answer replied " Chai..Paan khane hayen hain."
We all know that the blame game will go on and not a single soul will ever take responsibility. Being a journalist, who was there to report the incident, I somewhat was not comfortable with the expectation people looked at me with. I lent them my ears and listened to all that they had to say. But more than that, what could I do? Can I bring back their apathy can I bring then a new identity can I fix their wrecked happiness and give them a reason to live again? How equally helpless we journalists are in a situation like this...I wish these innocent souls knew.
The photo ID card has become a kind of internal passport. Without it, airports, hotels and even malls won't allow entry. But you can't get one till you already have one. TOI-Crest tracks one woman's quest for legitimacy.
This year Latika Ghosh flew by air for the first time. A housemaid, she travelled with her employers from Mumbai to Kolkata to attend a family wedding. But till she boarded the aircraft, one anxious thought eclipsed her delight at flying: what if she was asked to show photo identity?
Fortunately, the airline authorities didn't, as Ghosh was travelling with a group, whose 'leader' satisfied them with his ID. But if they had asked, she would have produced an access card - the sort office-goers wear around their necks - that declared that she's a housemaid. The access card was a last, desperate attempt to acquire a photo ID. Ghosh doesn't have a voter ID card. An inefficient enrolment system ensured that she hasn't got a voter ID even though she applied for one last year. She has no passport and getting a PAN card was tough as she had no photo ID to begin with.
The experience of chasing a photo ID was bewildering for Ghosh who has so far remained unaware of how the world has churned after 9/11. Photo IDs are now demanded for gaining access to all sorts of places, even those that seem unlikely targets of terror threats. While a photo ID has for some time been required at airports - not just at check-in counters but even at the entrance - it's now demanded in hotels, offices and even the parking lots of some malls. The photo ID has become a stamp of legitimacy, a sort of internal passport - if you don't have one, all sorts of borders are closed to you. At the same time, it has become harder to acquire - especially for the underprivileged.
The most basic form of photo ID is the voter ID card. "It's very difficult to get a voter ID card, " says Jockin Arputham, founder of the National Slum Dwellers' Federation (NSDF). Arputham was at the Dharavi office of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centre (SPARC), a sister NGO of NSDF. The office is a couple of rooms where Arputham holds a sort of durbar for slum dwellers with grievances. It was festooned with bouquets for Arputham, who was awarded a Padma Shri this year, and he sat at one end leaning against bolsters on a mattress. Twenty-five years ago, SPARC began issuing slum and pavement dwellers family ID cards. An average card has a list of all the family members, their sexes, ages and occupations, a group photograph and a SPARC stamp. Arputham explains that family ID cards are handy when it comes to housing allotments. Over the years, hundreds of slum dwellers have moved to rehabilitation colonies. Allotments, Arputham says, are fraught with forgeries. And slum dwellers often sell or sub-let their flats. Such crimes are kept in check with family ID cards, Arputham says, as they are harder to manipulate. It's easier to substitute a picture of one individual for another's in an ordinary photo ID than it is in a family photograph.
However, family IDs don't eliminate problems slum dwellers face when it comes to voting - one can vote even if one produces a valid photo ID other than a voter's ID card - or opening bank accounts. It's ironic as slum dwellers form the largest vote banks. Arputham says that he's trying to find a way to issue individual ID cards. "I'm trying to talk to policy makers at the top level to see if this is possible, " he says.
While photo ID serves a practical purpose - it's a tangible identification that facilitates various processes - the ubiquitous, and bothersome, demand for it prompts questions about its usefulness. How effective is it really as a security measure? American security expert Bruce Schneier considers photo ID checks an aspect of 'security theatre', a term that he famously coined. It refers to the practice of having security measures that give people the illusion of security. For instance, it hasn't been proved, Schneier writes, that photo ID checks actually deter security threats. (The same can be said of metal detectors that were enthusiastically installed in public areas in Mumbai after 26/11. Few of them actually work. )
Sanjay Pandey, a former IPS officer and e-security expert, believes that photo ID checks in places that are higher security risk - airports for instance - are necessary. But there are problems. "The lacuna is very clear - what constitutes photo ID has not been defined, " Pandey observes. "Everybody uses his own interpretation of photo ID. It should be (issued) by the government, like a PAN card or driving licence. Many people are using things like bank cards. " He suggests that photo ID checks be carried out at several points in a traveller's journey from airport to aircraft. Pandey paints a scenario: two passengers with harmful motives, after checking in, swap boarding cards. One leaves the airport. The other proceeds with a fake ID. "After that, there are many scenarios, " he says.
Pandey admits however that photo ID checks are needless in places that face little risk. "Go to software industries, " he says. "Even if they are doing nothing confidential, they ask for photo ID. At times it is harassment. It should be need-based. The paranoia is after 9/11 and the tempo is building. "
Nishant Shah, director-research of Bangalore's Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), is critical of biometry as a tool of authenticating identity as it is "weak and notoriously prone to forgery". Take the case of AADHAAR, the ongoing unique identification (UID) project. In the course of collecting data, it was found that fingerprints are not always a reliable form of identification. Manual labourers often have prints that are obscured by the work they do. "The way the system is designed right now, you give information that you like to the AADHAAR registrars who take that information at face value and grant you that identity, " Shah says. "At this simplest level, you can see the possibility of forgery, bad data, duplication, spelling and typographical errors, etc which would make the system collapse. This situation gets more complicated by the fact that, instead of relying on human indicators, there is a blind over-determined dependence on technologies of verification, which is not a wise thing. "
Despite the pitfalls of biometry, the photo ID is a powerful form of identity, Shah admits. But the way in which the photo ID is dispensed is problematic. Often to acquire documents that are considered valid photo ID, you have to show a photo ID. "The interesting part is that the authorities do not have any other system of verifying your identity other than your claim and the peers who substantiate it, " Shah points out. "In smaller villages, where everybody knows each other, this is easy. But in more complex systems where people don't necessarily know each other, they have to rely on other agencies to endorse their identities. It does lead to the strange paradox where your claim of being X can only be accepted when endorsed by somebody else who also depends on other structures to verify who you are. And thus starts the chicken and egg story: What comes first? Your claim to be X or somebody else's assertion that you are X?"
The village isn't the familial environment it used to be either. Ghosh's ID nightmare followed her from Mumbai airport to her village, Muragachha, in West Bengal's Nadia district. When she tried to access her postal savings account, she was told that in order to do so, she would have to show a voter's ID card. Human verification wasn't enough to prove her legitimacy. Preparations were on for the West Bengal assembly elections and party workers were pressuring villagers to enrol for voter ID cards. Ghosh was forcefully told to enrol, even though she lives in Mumbai. How else could she prove that she's Indian and not a Bangladeshi immigrant ? Unprepared for the transition into a suspicious world in which human ties are replaced by technology, Ghosh was shaken. She sighs, "What has the world come to?"
SIDDHARTHA SHANKAR MISHRA,
SAMBALPUR,ODISHA,
PH- +919937965779
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