I'm just a security researcher, and unfortunately I don't have any concrete suggestions. I'm hoping that the Supreme Court takes a favorable approach to this madness and limits the damage (by asking the government to stick to its 2015 order which limited mandatory usage of aadhaar to 3 schemes only, for eg).

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.