OK.  So now it should be clear what was behind the carrot held before NRIs (non-resident Indians) that was supposed to make travel back to the homeland so much easier.

Here’s the cruncher, quoted directly from the Government of India website:

• Biometric details of the applicant will be mandatorily captured at Immigration on arrival in India.

So that’s the price of lightening up some paper-work.

You either supply the government with your ancestral records or be prepared for your irises to be scanned.

If you watched the movie, “I Origins,” the Indian data bank of iris scans – unique in the world – is the central focus of the American microbiologist who is hunting for the perfect match for this dead girl friend’s irises – which turn out to belong to a very young Kashmiri orphan in Delhi.

The movie’s release,  around the same time that the  biometric national ID scheme in India was launched, makes me wonder if that wasn’t somehow a PR piece to soften the image of this monstrous project, one that was rightly rejected in Britain, but is now being foisted on India:

“The United Kingdom—a non-Schengen country—contemplated introducing fingerprints voluntarily as part of abiometricpassport 2.0, but ultimately decided against it. The UK government was preparing to launch abiometricnationalidentitycard, for which it gathered fingerprints from 15,000 volunteers for the project. But the new government“didn‘tbelieveIDcardswouldwork“ and physically destroyed the pilot identity databases. However, in 2010, the UK National Policing Improvement Agency also conducted apilottest to provide police officers with digital fingerprint scanners that could remotely match individuals’ fingerprints against a central database. The outcome of this project is unknown and, when questioned, the agencyrefused to disclose the error rates that resulted from its tests.

In the Netherlands, the database storage of digital fingerprinting for travel documentswas haltedfollowing questions over the reliability of the biometric technology. The Mayor of the City of Roermond reported that21 percent offingerprints collected in the city could not be used to identify any individuals. In April 2011, the Dutch Minister of Interior, in a letter to the Dutch House of Representatives, asserted that the number of false rejections (cases in which there is a “no-hit” for a lawful holder of a travel document) is too high to warrant using fingerprints for verification and identification. Currently, only fingerprints onto Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips in ID documents are being collected.”

Add all this information to the background history of the British firm Cox & Kings, to which the India visa process has been outsourced,  and you have to concede that the British Raj may be back….and most people don’t even know it.