August 11, 2020
The Indian government is planning to launch a mandatory digital health card modeled on Bill Gates’ concept. Under the ‘One Nation One Health Card’ scheme, a person’s medical history records, including all the treatments and tests that the person has undergone, will be digitally saved in this card. Hospitals, clinics, and doctors will all be linked to a central server. The move is aimed at mapping the health records of every citizen of the country in a digital format.
After the ‘One Nation One Ration Card’ scheme, the Government is now preparing to bring ‘One Nation One Health Card’ scheme. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to make the announcement on August 15, during the Independence Day celebrations, reported DNA.
The main foundation of the blueprint is a unique health ID for citizens, with Aadhaar as a key identifier. A 2018 proposal of the NITI Aayog, the NHS has been developed in consultation with iSPIRT – an organisation of private sector ‘volunteers’, some of whom have also been involved in building the Aadhaar infrastructure and running operations that leverage it.
While the government has moved ahead with sale of vehicle registration data of millions, released a tender for a nationwide facial recognition system and also passed Aadhaar amendment, the DNA Technology Bill and now the Digital Health Card, it is yet to table the data protection bill.
Lobby Group iSPIRT
Data researchers and activists, however, have expressed concerns about the development of this policy, which proposes a health data set-up on a foundation of India Stack – a bouquet of privately-owned proprietary software applications.
“The health stack was proposed by the lobby group iSPIRT,” told Srinivas Kodali, an independent researcher to The Quint.
IndiaStack is a set of APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilise the Aadhaar infrastructure for businesses like eKYC and UPI digital payments.
“In fact it was found that NITI Aayog was emailing all consultation documents to iSPIRT while they did not place them in public domain. The Blueprint appears to give more legitimacy to stacks, which have been under criticism,” added Kodali.
Simultaneously, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has initiated a COVID-19 Surveillance Project in India in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The data gathered through full-scale surveillance will be used to make future Indian strategies for containment in India.
Although, what “future strategies for containment” will be implemented by WHO’s pointman in India were not revealed, similar projects by the agency and related organisations implemented elsewhere give us a clear idea of where India is heading.
Vaccination based Digital Identity
A vaccination based digital identity program Trust Stamp funded by Bill Gates and implemented by Mastercard and GAVI, will soon link your biometric digital identity to your vaccination records. The program said to “evolve as you evolve” is part of the Global War on Cash and has the potential dual use for the purposes of surveillance and “predictive policing” based on your vaccination history. Those who may not wish to be vaccinated may be locked out of the system based on their trust score.
This Wellness Program involving GAVI, Mastercard, and Trust Stamp is soon going to be tested in West Africa. Similar program was also launched in the UK. The UK government is rolling out COVI PASS – Biometric RFID enabled Coronavirus Digital Health Passports to monitor nearly every aspect of citizens’ lives in the name of strengthening public health management through a military grade tech.
There is tremendous pressure on sovereign governments to implement such policies dictated by global agencies. Recently Belarus exposed the conditions laid by these agencies for loans being provided for COVID-19. The President of Belarus revealed that the World Bank coronavirus aid comes with conditions for imposing extreme lockdown measures, to model their coronavirus response on that of Italy and even changes in the economic policies which he refused as being “unacceptable”.
GreatGameIndia is a journal on Geopolitics and International Relations. Get to know the Geopolitical threats India is facing in our exclusive book India in Cognitive Dissonance. Past magazine issues can be accessed from the Archives section.
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