Regarding ballooning costs, so many successful programs have had costs that exceeded the plan, so far with Aadhar there has been no evidence that the ballooning costs have been debilitating and on the contrary Aadhar seems to be helping.
On balooning costs - Yes, the scope has vastly increased:
1. it was supposed to be a YES/NO boolean API, which has since become a complete eKYC API giving third parties access to your data
2. State resident data hubs that maintain a copy of your biometrics and data to enable state level surveillance
3. Pushing of mandatory linkages has cost us thousands of crores already.
(and more that I'm missing - this is early morning IST now and I'm getting sleepy). A lot of this should not have been allowed in a scheme that was passed in the parliament as a "Money Bill". The helping part is non-proportional to the expenditure which we've seen - this is under purview in the SC hearing as well.
Also when you say the costs are not proportional to the benefits... I don’t know if it needs to be proportional, also is there a well researchered study that talks negatively about the overall value provided - I find that hard to believe ?
Usually legislature is free to spend money on programs as long as it is not against the law or constitution and judiciary can’t interfere on such matters. I don’t know what is in the scope of S.C w.r.t Aadhar - I can see some kind of violation of civil liberties within its scope... but I can’t see how cost benefit analysis is within SC’s scope. So I may not comment on it until it plays out.