India’s identity scheme: The magic number | Hacker News Reader

India’s identity scheme: The magic number

economist.com

78 pointspitdesi30 comments

I really dislike the economist. To me the very first thing this program makes me think of is how the government will abuse it. They briefly mention that there is the possibility that some sort of privacy issue might pop up in the future, but quickly dismiss the argument as outweighed by the ends these means achieve. They even get a swipe in at 'market distorting subsidies' while their at it.

While other magazines might have bias the Economist takes it to a whole new level. I would call every piece of 'reporting' they do an editorial.

That said the article did prompt me to learn more. Top Google results which paint a slightly different picture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Identification_Authority...

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/indias-unique-id-project-all...

I disagree. It may be misused, but the amount of abuse of poor people due to not having an identity is so much worse. Poverty itself is already very dangerous. But poverty without having the ability to prove your own existance is so much more dangerous. Having an own passport or ID card is a big step for many people who had never any official papers about their being.

As the Wikipedia article details, the system may not work fully acurate, but it is so much simpler to implement and more reliable than anything else I could think of. Giving out ID cards only? They get lost or destroyed, fakes get made, poors get talked into handing their ID card to that nice guy who will go for them to this-or-that office (especially for elections, etc). A biometric signal is so much more difficult to lose or falsify or get talking into giving it up.

And the psycological effect of "officially being a unique person" is quite large (take a look a Muhammad Yunus' book on how he invented the microcredit system and estabished the Grameen bank in Bangladesh).

Applying rocket-science on poor people who don't understand social-profiling issues and intense racial issues sounds like a potent mix to me. System would not work at all, is different from "system may not work fully accurate" because well - you should read the fluff in their tender documents before you lose more tax-payers money.

A biometric database is hardly rocket science anymore. The main problems to overcome are likely not technical but administrative/political. I am pretty sure it will not work at first and for some time, as said political problems will need time to get (hopefully) worked out. As other posters said, only for all gov't offices to start to actually accept the UID will probably take many years. But its a good start.

I really like The Economist. It's true that it's generally happy to espouse a point of view in its stories but that makes it much more interesting than, say, the BBC whose impartiality makes it somewhat bland.

Their research and standard of writing are excellent - on par with The Guardian or The New York Times - and they occasionally have headlines that make me chuckle (such as this: http://www.economist.com/node/17854975 )

But I admit that I also like it because it's political leanings are similar to mine (although somewhat more to the right) and because it covers topics I'm interested in.

The Economist, like the New Yorker and Atlantic, are not un-biased newspapers. They pitch themselves as analysis. It's good to get un-biased data but egotistical to presume that you will extract all the relevance from it a priori. What separates good analysis from the bad is if the underlying data and methodology are presented; The Economist does a good job at this.

Regarding abuse of identity data, the US has a SSN identifying everyone. And when you immigrate or naturalise you provide fingerprints.

Privacy has an important place, but it does need to be balanced against things. Things like starving, uneducated, and abused populations.

I really want this to work, but I'm skeptical. I've lived in India, and I know that corruption is rampant. These "middle men" will try hard to figure out another way to game this system. Hopefully it's the start of something, but I think the economist is being a bit too optimistic in claiming that this alone will transform India.

Forcing the middlemen to come up with new ways of cheating the system would be a huge step-up from the status quo. Presently they don't even need to think!

Haha, yes, I absolutely agree.

This will atleast make it costly for the middle men to cheat. It will be difficult to replicate the retina / finger print scan. And that will surely reduce the low level corruption that directly affects the poor. Surely, this will not remove the high level corruptions (2g scandal etc).

Things will certainly get more difficult for these "middle men", but not by all that much. There is no need for them to replicate the retina/fingerprint scans or do anything hi-tech/expensive like that. The poor will still need to exchange the money paid into their accounts for actual goods and supplies like food and clean water. Simply giving the money directly to the poor will not affect the scarcity of these resources.

What will happen is that the poor will simply withdraw the entire sum the day it has been paid in to their accounts, and give it to these "middle men". All that changes is the direction. Instead of the welfare money flowing down from the government to the individual programs to the "middle men", it will be flowing up from the poor through the individual traders to these same "middle men".

Yes, I agree. That issue is tough to solve.

But this will solve the issue about people that do not exist at all. The ones that is artificially created by the middle men to scoop the money off and who only exist on paper.

are these middle men serving as a buffer between large parts of the population and the government? i see both positives and negatives to such a relationship... one that has evolved over a long period of time.

In a way, yes. It is an evolved relationship. Middlemen started out as traders who acted as the exchange mechanism, for example between farmer bodies and the consumers. Over time they have grown in strength and sadly in autonomy. Middlemen bodies exert huge influence over retail prices of goods in India.

Things are changing and schemes like UID combined with Food security bill, direct money transfer to banks etc would bring a huge change in the social fabric. UID will serve as a basis for all future social programmes.

There is tons to do even if the UID is successfully rolled out through out the country. First and foremost would be to get all government services to willingly accept the UID as the standard scheme ... I know that sounds ironic but such is the life in India ...

Can't agree more... Getting all the govt. bodies to start using UID could well take 5 years....

Ah! How optimistic :)

The only reason why this project will fall-on-the-face is that here a Government with least technical competence (notwithstanding the down-votes) is dreaming to implement a solution (almost Utopian) to the most socio-technically challenging problem known worldwide and that too for a country of a billion bare-footed men. Besides, there is no-one to stop the nation from bleeding to scams and corruption.

Edited: Punctuation.

This. A million times this.

A look at the site of our national telephone company (www.bsnl.co.in) and our railway ticketing service would tell you more than any comment I could write.

Like everywhere else, India has great programmers. Somehow the government never seems to be able to afford them.

I can't imagine the chaos that UID will bring.

If this was proposed for a 'developed' country, there would rightly be uproar from civil liberties groups, citizens etc. But because it's happening in an 'underdeveloped' country, it's somehow acceptable. I understand the challenges faced by the Indian government in providing services to a such a huge population but this approach is open to rampant abuse by the 'middlemen' and by elements in the government itself. Any self-respecting 'security' agency would get their tentacles into something like this asap. Doubtless, they're already involved in the implementation on the quiet.

[edit: corrected typo]

Is social security number in US being misused? Developed countries would already have a unique ID in place.

Also, middlemen will not be able to take advantage of this. They will be cut out completely when the person has to avail the benefits after identifying himself/herself.

SSN took at least 150 years to implement and there is substantial difference between the American and Indian situation. Middlemen are already there isn't it? - Technical services companies like TCS, Infosys etc. who are getting paid in billions for something that Facebook/mobile type of platform could also implement at a much lower cost.

I really don't really see your argument. Can you explain a little more?

I can hear the uproar now: "It's these poor people's RIGHT to starve because they cannot prove who they are, and because middle-men are stealing their grain!"

You're applying a first-world dilemma to a second-world nation a large percentage of whose citizens live in third-world poverty. Let's pull them up onto the level at which they can begin to worry about that, instead of trying to prematurely optimize.

When you have no food to eat, and you see that your food is taken by middle men, then the issues of privacy, freedom of speech etc becomes irrelevant.

But once your stomach is full and you don't have to work 18 hours a day x 7 days a week to feed your family (not talking about startup founders, but those other who will remain hungry even if they miss half a day of work day of work) then you start noticing your privacy and your freedom.

How will people with no eyes or no fingers (it happens) use government services?

If you have neither fingers nor eyes, I think you have bigger problems than that.

Those without their eyes or fingers are probably the ones more requiring of gov't services.

We've got wrinkles all over our bodies. I can't imagine it's all that difficult to hack together something that can read a toe-print, or a wrist-print.

I think the bigger problem is if someone who's already enrolled suffers an eye or hand injury.

Hard to picture corrupt politicians allowing this to go through.

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