VARC Test - 13

Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the question that follows. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.

It is clear now that the Centre has dropped all arguments for “public good” when it comes to mass surveillance measures. Two recent developments illustrate this. A report by the Indian Express said the government had been asking telecommunication companies for the call data records of all users in certain pockets of the country on certain days. Another investigative series by HuffPost India shows how the Centre is planning a National Social Registry, a “360-degree database” to track the lives of all Indians.

Neither measure seems to be backed by law or follow due process. As the government pushed forward with them in stealth, it dispensed with the usual justifications for mass surveillance that violates privacy guidelines set down by the Supreme Court – national security or the targeted delivery of goods and services.

Mass requests for call data records were sought in January and February. In a letter to the telecom department, mobile service providers noted that no reason had been offered for requesting such great amounts of data. They also violate the procedure for call requests laid down in 2013, after a snooping scandal shook the government.

The social registry seems to have flowed from a project to update the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census. An exercise to create a database that was updated in real time so that pro-poor government schemes reached the right beneficiaries seems to have mutated into the stuff of science fiction. It will be “an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents”, says the report.

It dispenses with the anonymity that enumerating exercises like the Census must adhere to. Aadhaar numbers will be used to integrate information on religion, caste, income, property, marital status, education, family. In order to enable this, the Unique Identification Authority of India proposes to tweak the Aadhaar rules. That would effectively nullify the privacy safeguards put in by the 2018 Supreme Court judgment.

Both measures – the request for call data records and the creation of a social registry – seem to intersect with the government’s citizenship project. The call data requests were made during the two months that protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act and a proposed National Register of Citizens raged across the country. The protests had stemmed from the fact that the law and the register projected an exclusionary idea of Indian citizenship, that they could be used to harass minorities that the state did not favour.

Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the question that follows. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.

It is clear now that the Centre has dropped all arguments for “public good” when it comes to mass surveillance measures. Two recent developments illustrate this. A report by the Indian Express said the government had been asking telecommunication companies for the call data records of all users in certain pockets of the country on certain days. Another investigative series by HuffPost India shows how the Centre is planning a National Social Registry, a “360-degree database” to track the lives of all Indians.

Neither measure seems to be backed by law or follow due process. As the government pushed forward with them in stealth, it dispensed with the usual justifications for mass surveillance that violates privacy guidelines set down by the Supreme Court – national security or the targeted delivery of goods and services.

Mass requests for call data records were sought in January and February. In a letter to the telecom department, mobile service providers noted that no reason had been offered for requesting such great amounts of data. They also violate the procedure for call requests laid down in 2013, after a snooping scandal shook the government.

The social registry seems to have flowed from a project to update the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census. An exercise to create a database that was updated in real time so that pro-poor government schemes reached the right beneficiaries seems to have mutated into the stuff of science fiction. It will be “an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents”, says the report.

It dispenses with the anonymity that enumerating exercises like the Census must adhere to. Aadhaar numbers will be used to integrate information on religion, caste, income, property, marital status, education, family. In order to enable this, the Unique Identification Authority of India proposes to tweak the Aadhaar rules. That would effectively nullify the privacy safeguards put in by the 2018 Supreme Court judgment.

Both measures – the request for call data records and the creation of a social registry – seem to intersect with the government’s citizenship project. The call data requests were made during the two months that protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act and a proposed National Register of Citizens raged across the country. The protests had stemmed from the fact that the law and the register projected an exclusionary idea of Indian citizenship, that they could be used to harass minorities that the state did not favour.

Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the question that follows. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.

It is clear now that the Centre has dropped all arguments for “public good” when it comes to mass surveillance measures. Two recent developments illustrate this. A report by the Indian Express said the government had been asking telecommunication companies for the call data records of all users in certain pockets of the country on certain days. Another investigative series by HuffPost India shows how the Centre is planning a National Social Registry, a “360-degree database” to track the lives of all Indians.

Neither measure seems to be backed by law or follow due process. As the government pushed forward with them in stealth, it dispensed with the usual justifications for mass surveillance that violates privacy guidelines set down by the Supreme Court – national security or the targeted delivery of goods and services.

Mass requests for call data records were sought in January and February. In a letter to the telecom department, mobile service providers noted that no reason had been offered for requesting such great amounts of data. They also violate the procedure for call requests laid down in 2013, after a snooping scandal shook the government.

The social registry seems to have flowed from a project to update the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census. An exercise to create a database that was updated in real time so that pro-poor government schemes reached the right beneficiaries seems to have mutated into the stuff of science fiction. It will be “an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents”, says the report.

It dispenses with the anonymity that enumerating exercises like the Census must adhere to. Aadhaar numbers will be used to integrate information on religion, caste, income, property, marital status, education, family. In order to enable this, the Unique Identification Authority of India proposes to tweak the Aadhaar rules. That would effectively nullify the privacy safeguards put in by the 2018 Supreme Court judgment.

Both measures – the request for call data records and the creation of a social registry – seem to intersect with the government’s citizenship project. The call data requests were made during the two months that protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act and a proposed National Register of Citizens raged across the country. The protests had stemmed from the fact that the law and the register projected an exclusionary idea of Indian citizenship, that they could be used to harass minorities that the state did not favour.

Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the question that follows. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.

It is clear now that the Centre has dropped all arguments for “public good” when it comes to mass surveillance measures. Two recent developments illustrate this. A report by the Indian Express said the government had been asking telecommunication companies for the call data records of all users in certain pockets of the country on certain days. Another investigative series by HuffPost India shows how the Centre is planning a National Social Registry, a “360-degree database” to track the lives of all Indians.

Neither measure seems to be backed by law or follow due process. As the government pushed forward with them in stealth, it dispensed with the usual justifications for mass surveillance that violates privacy guidelines set down by the Supreme Court – national security or the targeted delivery of goods and services.

Mass requests for call data records were sought in January and February. In a letter to the telecom department, mobile service providers noted that no reason had been offered for requesting such great amounts of data. They also violate the procedure for call requests laid down in 2013, after a snooping scandal shook the government.

The social registry seems to have flowed from a project to update the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census. An exercise to create a database that was updated in real time so that pro-poor government schemes reached the right beneficiaries seems to have mutated into the stuff of science fiction. It will be “an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents”, says the report.

It dispenses with the anonymity that enumerating exercises like the Census must adhere to. Aadhaar numbers will be used to integrate information on religion, caste, income, property, marital status, education, family. In order to enable this, the Unique Identification Authority of India proposes to tweak the Aadhaar rules. That would effectively nullify the privacy safeguards put in by the 2018 Supreme Court judgment.

Both measures – the request for call data records and the creation of a social registry – seem to intersect with the government’s citizenship project. The call data requests were made during the two months that protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act and a proposed National Register of Citizens raged across the country. The protests had stemmed from the fact that the law and the register projected an exclusionary idea of Indian citizenship, that they could be used to harass minorities that the state did not favour.

Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the question that follows. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.

It is clear now that the Centre has dropped all arguments for “public good” when it comes to mass surveillance measures. Two recent developments illustrate this. A report by the Indian Express said the government had been asking telecommunication companies for the call data records of all users in certain pockets of the country on certain days. Another investigative series by HuffPost India shows how the Centre is planning a National Social Registry, a “360-degree database” to track the lives of all Indians.

Neither measure seems to be backed by law or follow due process. As the government pushed forward with them in stealth, it dispensed with the usual justifications for mass surveillance that violates privacy guidelines set down by the Supreme Court – national security or the targeted delivery of goods and services.

Mass requests for call data records were sought in January and February. In a letter to the telecom department, mobile service providers noted that no reason had been offered for requesting such great amounts of data. They also violate the procedure for call requests laid down in 2013, after a snooping scandal shook the government.

The social registry seems to have flowed from a project to update the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census. An exercise to create a database that was updated in real time so that pro-poor government schemes reached the right beneficiaries seems to have mutated into the stuff of science fiction. It will be “an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents”, says the report.

It dispenses with the anonymity that enumerating exercises like the Census must adhere to. Aadhaar numbers will be used to integrate information on religion, caste, income, property, marital status, education, family. In order to enable this, the Unique Identification Authority of India proposes to tweak the Aadhaar rules. That would effectively nullify the privacy safeguards put in by the 2018 Supreme Court judgment.

Both measures – the request for call data records and the creation of a social registry – seem to intersect with the government’s citizenship project. The call data requests were made during the two months that protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act and a proposed National Register of Citizens raged across the country. The protests had stemmed from the fact that the law and the register projected an exclusionary idea of Indian citizenship, that they could be used to harass minorities that the state did not favour.

Direction: Some words have been given below along with a statement where they have been used in a certain context. You have to find the word from the options which is the most opposite to the given context and mark that as your answer.

Direction: Some words have been given below along with a statement where they have been used in a certain context. You have to find the word from the options which is the most opposite to the given context and mark that as your answer.

Direction: In the following sentence, some parts have error and some are correct. Find out which part has an error and mark it as your answer. If there is no error, mark ‘No error’ as your answer.

Direction: Some sentences are missing from the text. Choose from the list (A-C) the most appropriate sentences to complete the text. There is also an extra sentence that you do not need to use.