For some reason, governments - as well as the development ''industry'' as a whole - have always had a tendency to look for universal panaceas, particular silver bullets that will solve all or most of their implementation problems and somehow achieve the development project for them. The latest such initiative bullet that seems to have been accepted as a silver bullet is the Unique Identification Project, which is now seen...
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Radia taps on 'complaint' of her being 'foreign agent': Govt to SC by Dhananjay Mahapatra
The Union government on Friday strongly defended the interception of Niira Radia's telephones, saying that this was done because of a probe into complaints alleging that she "as an agent of foreign intelligence agencies" and was "indulging in anti-national activities." A joint affidavit filed by ministries of home and finance as well as the Income Tax department said, "A complaint was received by the finance minister dated November 16, 2007, inter...
More »Radia tapes didn't leak from IT Department: Centre
Affidavit silent on Tata's plea to stop further publication of tapesInvestigations not yet over, no question of destroying recordsThe Income Tax Department, which had recorded telephonic conversations of corporate lobbyist Niira Radia, was not responsible for the leak of the tapes, a common affidavit filed by the Centre in the Supreme Court said on Friday.In its reply to the writ petition filed by industrialist Rata Tata alleging that publication of...
More »Right to privacy or the right to do business with UID database?
Industrialist Ratan Tata has the capacity to challenge a breach of his privacy in the Supreme Court. But what about the nearly 60 crore Indian residents who don’t know what will become of the biometric data being collected by UIDAI? The leak of the Niira Radia tapes in India and thousands of US classified documents on WikiLeaks, has stirred up again the debate on privacy. Earlier this week, Tata group chairman...
More »The Brave New World of the Glass House by Prabir Purkayastha
What does the Niira Radia tapes, Wikileaks and whole body scanners have in common? It is the end of privacy both for the public individual or the private one. For the public individual, every thing that they speak or write can now be put in public domain. A quarter of a million cables from US Embassies around the world, some of them marked highly confidential are now public. So are...
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