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The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has set an ambitious target of allotting UID numbers to two crore persons in Maharashtra by March 31. The State's population numbers over 10 crore. Early this week, the actual process of UID enrolment across the State has commenced. This process is being done by 15 companies which include IT majors such as Wipro and Spanco. State Bank of India, Union Bank, Indian Bank, and Bank of Maharashtra, have also tied up with UIDAI for issuing unique identity (UID) numbers. A UIDAI official on condition of anonymity told Business Line "For companies, the main driver for issuing maximum number of valid UIDs is a payment of Rs 50, which they will receive for every successful enrolment. Banks, through their UID drive, will get new customers whom they can sell financial products to, he said. UIDAI has also devised a system of incentives where if a company/bank manages to achieve 80 per cent of its target then it will receive 20 per cent additional payment. If the company/bank manages a 50 per cent target then they will get an additional 4 per cent payment.

Banks have shot down a proposal from the National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid) to gain access to their confidential customer data.Their anxiety to guard customer information from the prying eyes of the Home Ministry's ambitious anti-terror project seems to have drawn the support of the Reserve Bank of India.

Cyber Crime police on Friday evening arrested an internet hacker, Vangalapudi Vijaya Kumar, 23, for swindling Rs 30,600 from an HDFC Bank customer. Vijaya Kumar, a resident of Boduppal and a native of Krishna district, secured the internet banking user name and password of a cyber cafe visitor. He used the details to purchase online a mobile phone (Nokia N-97) worth Rs 30,600 on December 3. On December 8, he sold the mobile instrument for Rs 20,000 to one Shahnawaz Zubair, a mobile vender at Jagdish Market, Abids. Through the IMEI number of the phone, the duo were traced and arrested, an official press release said.

"The Indian Army will start DNA profiling of its soldiers this year for their identification in case of mutilation of bodies during an operation, attack or any kind of mishap. "We will begin DNA profiling of soldiers from this year as the profiling centre and data bank are almost ready," Lieutenant General Naresh Kumar, Commandant of Army Hospital Research and Referral, told PTI. Being set up at the Department of Forensic Medicine in Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, the centre will collect the blood samples of the troops who are involved in hazardous tasks, including fighting militancy, and store them in a DNA data bank. The DNA profiling centre is being established to help in identification of bodies mutilated beyond recognition. "Now that this centre and DNA data bank are almost ready to take off, we will be able to easily recognise the mutilated dead bodies that we get during war time, from an episode of avalanches or from blast sites." "

Nineteen Eighty-Four may arrive sooner than you think. And, it will be the income-tax department that could take on the role of an Orwellian Big Brother should the government clear a far-reaching proposal to create a directorate of criminal investigation on the lines of a similar wing of the internal revenue service in the US. Under a blueprint currently being vetted by the I-T department, the directorate will house a centralised repository of data culled from telephone and Internet intercepts, banking and market transactions, cross-border deals and even your friendly neighbourhood ATM. To analyse this data and red-flag suspicious activities, the department will also acquire state-of-the-art forensic tools, including software to follow cash trails, track money laundering, conduct forensic audits, mine books and other texts, as well as plug into overseas servers and social networking sites.

o not be surprised if you are asked to furnish information under more than eight mandatory heads - demographic and biometric - when you go for registration under the Unique Identification (UID) number project in Himachal Pradesh. The state has tapped the UID project at its initial stage and combined it with its own food and civil supplies department project aimed for better delivery of services in future. Along with the eight mandatory questions under the UID project - name, residence, date of birth, photo, all 10 finger prints and iris image - the citizens will now also be asked to provide information about their status on ration cards, PAN cards, LPG connection and bank accounts. This additional information would be used exclusively by the state government for future planning and eliminating duplication in delivery of services by the food and civil supplies and consumer affairs department. The department is the nodal agency for monitoring the UID project in Himachal.

The law ministry is working on a proposal to make right to privacy a fundamental right in the Indian Constitution. The right to privacy would include the right to confidentiality of communication, confidentiality of private or family life, protection of his honour and good name, protection from search, detention or exposure of lawful communication between individuals, privacy from surveillance, confidentiality of banking, financial, medical and legal information, protection from identity theft of various kinds, protection of use of a person's photographs, fingerprints, DNA samples and other samples taken at police stations and other places and protection of data relating to individual.