Amid hue and cry over government’s over-emphasis on Aadhaar, Centre has launched a social media contest to promote the Unique Identification number and make it more appealing to common man. Under the new contest, parents will have to submit videos of their children narrating the benefits of Aadhaar. The videos should be creative and it needs to communicate well. Touted out to be the biggest digital data programme in the world, nearly 113 crore people have been issued the Aadhaar numbers. As it seems many on social media saw the contest as government’s ploy to shrug-off growing concern over security of Aadhaar Data.
Here are some of the tweets that saw netizens venting it out over the #Aadhaarstar Contest
@UIDAI Seriously you need advertising from kids .
— Mayur Sand (@ManURock) April 17, 2017
@UIDAI Babies barcoded at birth. Lovely.
— _ Nihilist (@AnNihiIist) April 13, 2017
@UIDAI pic.twitter.com/eG34Y72HOO
— #destroyaadhar (@angryyoungman11) April 8, 2017
@UIDAI Now, this kid is being used to popularise Aadhaar Card for Aadhaar Kendras to collect more bribes!#AadhaarShame@narendramodi @PMOIndia
— Abhishek Pandey (@meabhishek) April 18, 2017
@UIDAI what kind of advertising is this…is it required actually??
— Vsl Ml (@VslMl1) April 13, 2017
@UIDAI Better instead resorting such tokenism, U derive ways, means in order to facilitate larger masses still for hassle free corrections to cards
— S.N.Lal (@ShivNLal) April 8, 2017
The Aadhaar issue snowballed into a controversy when cricketer MS dhoni’s wife Sakshi Dhoni complained to union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad that a volunteer inadvertently made former Indian captain’s Aadhaar details public. Already confronted with many questions over fake aadhaar cards, data integrity and privacy issues, the Dhoni episode acted as a trigger on the issue. The Unique Identification Authority of India or UIDAI recently suspended the authentication services of Axis Bank over concerns about biometrics data being saved illegally. Despite the noise, the government continues to insist that its database is safe, a point that the government has also made forcefully in parliament. The government has so far used Aadhar in around 100 programmes including PDS, Pahal, MGNREGS, pensions, scholarships, etc.
