> For decades people have been saying that the money from grants/subsidies/schemes for poor vanishes between the government and the recipient due to the multiple "middlemen" involved and cutting that out is the way to solve it. Now that is also not the acceptable solution?
Yes cutting the middleman is the solution but there are various ways of cutting the middleman. The onus is on the people who support it to show that Aadhar indeed cuts the middleman and improves the said goal.
> Then what is the solution that falls under the category of "meaningful access"?
The parent comment attributed Aadhar to opening of bank accounts. I responded by saying that opening of bank accounts is not a good proxy for meaningful access to bank accounts. There's a difference.
> Yes there is a digital divide but what does having bank accounts got to do with it? Computer illiterate people have been going to banks for decades.
That was exactly the point, I asked. What has Aadhar got to do with bank accounts?
> The idea of Aadhar is to have an identifier like a social security number.
Yeah - except that Aadhar is not anything like SSN.
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/aadhaar-vs-so...
https://scroll.in/article/823570/despite-the-comparisons-ind...
> So many of transactions in India have been hidden from the taxman because there was lack of the necessary setup to link/consolidate flow of money to a person/business. Aadhar + increased digitisation and reduction in (mainly high value) cash transactions makes tax evasion more difficult. If this idea doesn't have merit then what is your proposal?
The same way it is been done in all other countries without a biometric ID card.
> If you have suggestions for improvements/alternative solutions, then feel free to list them. All I'm seeing is criticism without any suggestions.
An inherent flawed idea can't be made perfect. More reading on why : http://www.lse.ac.uk/management/research/identityproject/