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I'm from India too. While I don't support the Aadhaar program in it's present form, just so that we understand the arguments from the other side: India has a l

I'm from India too. While I don't support the Aadhaar program in it's present form, just so that we understand the arguments from the other side: India has a lot of problems but most of them stem from two causes: 1. Corruption 2. Inequality In positions of power, corruption is universal. I have yet to meet a person in Bangalore who has been able to purchase property without paying a bribe. Too many of our government 'servants' are sociopaths. It's a generally accepted fact (with no citation needed) that a non-insignificant portion of government spending on social programs and infrastructure is going un-tracked into private pockets. Secondly, inequality. A lot of people get away with things in politics. Robert Vadra gets through security checks though he's not a diplomat, Modiji (allegedly) gets degrees without going to college and Jayalalitha from my own state had people falling not only at her feet but touching the tires of her car. Aadhaar is the 'leveler' that shines light on the financial activities of all these people. 1. Aadhaar is linked to biometrics = aadhaar is linked to a real person 2. You can't live / work in India without Aadhaar = Government employees and people with influence are not exempt. 3. You can't handle money or avail social benefits from the government in India without linking Aadhaar to it = Illegal money can be tracked. This could solve a lot of problems. Of-course there are problems with this apart from the well publicized privacy issues. You can apparently purchase fake Aadhaar cards for a few hundred rupees. It's been reported that more than one person has bought an Aadhaar card for a pet and if it's that simple to beat the system then all the good intentions fall flat.

captn3m0 9y ago
The right way to fix corruption is to make the state transparent - RTI was a right step in this direction. Opening up the citizen to the state feels like progress, but isn't really.
- fooker 9y ago
  That is like saying that the right way to fix bugs is by conducting meetings to grill the programmer. Sure, it can work but it does not scale. If clerks spend all day manually answering RTI queries who will do the work?
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Where in the world do clerks spend all day answering FOI/RTI queries? I feel people greatly overestimate the typical volume of requests, having personally known at least three FOI officers in two jurisdictions. When you're seeing elevated request volume, it's likely that there's something substantial worth requesting, which is exactly the point of this form of legislation.
    - fooker 9y ago
      Keeping my analogy, developers do not spend the whole day at meetings, but meeting to fix bugs are not generally worth it. Also, when there is a high volume of meetings, there is likely something wrong. I know for a fact that in the Indian Railways, people spend weeks digging up information required to answer RTI queries. Instead of going by feelings ask government employees (preferably someone with a high level view of things) about it. I am not saying RTI is useless. However, without a computerized infrastructure for most, if not all, protocols and processes in the government, it is just a game of cat and mouse.
      - microcolonel 9y ago
        > I know for a fact that in the Indian Railways, people spend weeks digging up information required to answer RTI queries. The usual solution to a problem like that is to publish the frequently requested types of information in bulk, before they need to be requested, since they are public records by definition. It costs a bit more than doing nothing, but not nearly as much as corruption does.
    - csydas 9y ago
      > When you're seeing elevated request volume, it's likely that there's something substantial worth requesting Or you're seeing persons trying to frustrate the system with senseless requests. This happens with businesses all the time when they provide courtesy services (sprint's tty service for example was a regular tool for prank calls, USPS and their free boxes resulted in people being flooded with box orders) I'm 100% for transparency, but it's not a magic bullet. There is a real and non trivial cost for such transparency and it's the price we have to pay for diligence. often, societies seem unwilling to pay and instead demand that an organization do everything they used to and more with no additional resources, and transparency, especially for organizatikns without the resources to have digitized things,means a lot of human input and work.
- fareesh 9y ago
  RTI puts a target on your back if you ask the wrong questions. So many have died already.
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  The "party with a difference" and the self procliamed "transparent" party has reduced funding for RTI by 1/4th and almost all RTIs are rejected due to flimsy reasons.
saagarjha 9y ago
I'm not sure I quite understand how this is going to fight corruption. How are you going to track money that's being moved illegally? Presumably, nobody is going to be doing this under their Aadhaar card; it's all going to be in cash. Plus, how would you even access Aadhaar card information to audit this? Are you going to call up the government and ask for them to check Modi's card to make sure he hasn't been stealing money?
- fma 9y ago
  Can't be all cash...so that helps. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/india-bans-largest-currency-bills-for-now-n-bid-to-cut-corruption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/india-bans-large...
  - blackoil 9y ago
    It is still all cash. Govt. removed 1000 INR note, only to introduce a 2000 INR note. This was done as a surprise move under foolish assumption that people hoarding black money, would lose all and we'll get a fresh start. Naturally people being smarter then government, found ways to transfer it all taking 5-10% in laundering charges.
    - GordonS 9y ago
      Can you elaborate on how laundering it was possible? Genuinely interested.
      - blackoil 9y ago
        1. One the day demonetization was announced at 8PM, all jewelers were open till till 12 and sold gold with post dated delivery. 2. Till next few days, most retailers were doing backdated bills for large ticket items. 3. In India lot of people didn't had bank a/c. To allow them to convert old currency, people were allowed to convert cash upto 4k INR, by just showing any ID. Bank managers used stash of IDs they had collected over years, to convert huge amount of cash to new notes. Apart from this, local mafia used millions of poor to get the cash converted. These are common and publicly known methods.
sumedh 9y ago
> 1. Corruption 2. Inequality How about actually catching bringing back people who have fled the country like Nirav Modi and Mallya or how about making sure a celebrity like Salman Khan goes to jail.
- thewhitetulip 9y ago
  Lol when the media did their job for once after 2014, reporting on norav Modi The govt intelligently stifled free speech by making good on the death of a film star. Tada! Nobody reports on Nirav Modi anymore Also, the judge who found Salamn as guilty was transferred a day after he pronounced the statement and the other judge, presumably close to BJP gave Salman bail. 80other judgea are transferred But does the media report on it? No
duxup 9y ago
How does Aadhaar stop corruption? You think the corrupt are just going to check in with their fingerprints and "Oh man you caught me?" This seems like a system that will just hit those with lesser means. I'm not sure I see that as equality or something that would stop corruption.
- realandreskytt 9y ago
  A computer cant be bribed. Move transactions online, cut out the middleman and corruption goes down. To do this, you need a strong national identity scheme. Aashaar is a good start but would need to be augmented with derived authentication mechanisms (preferably pki) to reduce reliance on the biometrics
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > A computer cant be bribed. The people responsible for it can, though.
  - intended 9y ago
    Security failure always moves to the weakest link. The issue with bribery is always a differential of power = rent seeking behavior. This makes aadhar the enabler of corruption, not the remover of it, since now the State is so deeply intertwined in your life that it is inextricable. Aadhar will long term make things more corrupt. The current levels of corruption will look childish - it returns us to pre 1980 levels of corruption
  - duxup 9y ago
    I really don't think this is all that well thought out of a system. I have my doubts that the corruption that really plagues a nation occurs at a sort of point of sale like system that is being developed here. You can still bribe a judge ... politician, government official just fine off the grid.
vijaybritto 9y ago
Enforcing law and order should take away corruption from the country, not a high risk scheme like this. I'm not really comfortable with linking anything because this govt literally gets away with murder. These things only enable them to pin point us easily when we resist. I voted for them despite my friends' advice. Seriously regret it now. There are numerous countries in the world who have a very low rate of corruption without forcing the citizens to enroll in a scheme like this. If you think digitizing would reduce corruption you cannot be more mistaken. Its only a matter of time before they figure out other ways. It will reduce only when the citizens respect/fear law and order. This scheme has a lot of power more than we can comprehend and I don't want it under corrupt hands. As you said, from a person who is so insecure about his own educational qualification that he has lied with a fake degree and does not allow a fair probe into it.
- siddharth-shah 9y ago
  >"There are numerous countries in the world who have a very low rate of corruption without forcing the citizens to enroll in a scheme like this." Just curious, can you name them and provide sources.
  - vijaybritto 9y ago
    Note the countries with the least corruption: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2016 http://www.transparency.org/cpi2016 Compare with the data in this article: https://scroll.in/article/851282/are-countries-with-a-poor-democratic-record-more-likely-to-mandate-an-aadhaar-like-id https://scroll.in/article/851282/are-countries-with-a-poor-d... The graphs show the data excellently.
vr46 9y ago
I agree that this will solve a lot of problems, despite my reservations about the system. A few years ago, I spent three months interviewing and photographing many of the nomadic and scheduled tribes of Gujarat, which made for a good example of disenfranchised people in India generally: lack of voter id or ration cards, which made it hard or impossible to receive assistance, work, medical care, and attention in general from the authorities. Huge efforts by organizations such as VSSM and Janpath to help tribal people obtain their correct papers literally changed their lives. It gave them political influence as a large group of voters; it gave them access to applying for land to make permanent settlements. One group of people that were very upset with these efforts must be apoplectic with rage over Aadhaar: greedy and corrupt representatives in panchayats. No longer would they be the sole conduit for money, food, work and representation. My €0.02
- intended 9y ago
  Wait a little. Indians are very very good at thinking out of the box, and specialize in working against rules. Its our national past time to be honest. In many cases, people will let you take the money and then will just pressure you for it. Aadhar does not solve that. Cheaters (which is what corruption is) basically adapt to rules. Your assumption is that things will remain the same. They will not. Aadhar achieves nothing, because the core issue we have is enforcement of the law at both the center and the periphery. This means autonomy of the police force, expansion of the judiciary. You will not find one party advocating for this. Instead the parties know that Indians love the idea and concept of magic bullets, and they sell that as the product.
intended 9y ago
Aadhar does not solve any of those issues. You forget - corruption or cheating is an evolving system. There is no set of static rules which govern the world. Cheaters as a result always adapt and find an edge. Finally - The massively hurtful demonitzation exercise failed to uncover large amounts of hidden cash. While everyone who worked with money knew this, the lay people still believe in magic bullets and tech optimism to solve what are inherently human issues. -----
krtkush 9y ago
> people with influence are not exempt. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/aadhaar-card-mandatory-for-all-modi-government-bjp-ministers-rti-1067162-2017-10-18 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/aadhaar-card-mandatory...

captn3m0 9y ago

The right way to fix corruption is to make the state transparent - RTI was a right step in this direction. Opening up the citizen to the state feels like progress, but isn't really.

fooker 9y ago
That is like saying that the right way to fix bugs is by conducting meetings to grill the programmer. Sure, it can work but it does not scale. If clerks spend all day manually answering RTI queries who will do the work?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Where in the world do clerks spend all day answering FOI/RTI queries? I feel people greatly overestimate the typical volume of requests, having personally known at least three FOI officers in two jurisdictions. When you're seeing elevated request volume, it's likely that there's something substantial worth requesting, which is exactly the point of this form of legislation.
  - fooker 9y ago
    Keeping my analogy, developers do not spend the whole day at meetings, but meeting to fix bugs are not generally worth it. Also, when there is a high volume of meetings, there is likely something wrong. I know for a fact that in the Indian Railways, people spend weeks digging up information required to answer RTI queries. Instead of going by feelings ask government employees (preferably someone with a high level view of things) about it. I am not saying RTI is useless. However, without a computerized infrastructure for most, if not all, protocols and processes in the government, it is just a game of cat and mouse.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      > I know for a fact that in the Indian Railways, people spend weeks digging up information required to answer RTI queries. The usual solution to a problem like that is to publish the frequently requested types of information in bulk, before they need to be requested, since they are public records by definition. It costs a bit more than doing nothing, but not nearly as much as corruption does.
  - csydas 9y ago
    > When you're seeing elevated request volume, it's likely that there's something substantial worth requesting Or you're seeing persons trying to frustrate the system with senseless requests. This happens with businesses all the time when they provide courtesy services (sprint's tty service for example was a regular tool for prank calls, USPS and their free boxes resulted in people being flooded with box orders) I'm 100% for transparency, but it's not a magic bullet. There is a real and non trivial cost for such transparency and it's the price we have to pay for diligence. often, societies seem unwilling to pay and instead demand that an organization do everything they used to and more with no additional resources, and transparency, especially for organizatikns without the resources to have digitized things,means a lot of human input and work.
fareesh 9y ago
RTI puts a target on your back if you ask the wrong questions. So many have died already.
thewhitetulip 9y ago
The "party with a difference" and the self procliamed "transparent" party has reduced funding for RTI by 1/4th and almost all RTIs are rejected due to flimsy reasons.

saagarjha 9y ago

I'm not sure I quite understand how this is going to fight corruption. How are you going to track money that's being moved illegally? Presumably, nobody is going to be doing this under their Aadhaar card; it's all going to be in cash. Plus, how would you even access Aadhaar card information to audit this? Are you going to call up the government and ask for them to check Modi's card to make sure he hasn't been stealing money?

fma 9y ago
Can't be all cash...so that helps. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/india-bans-largest-currency-bills-for-now-n-bid-to-cut-corruption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/india-bans-large...
- blackoil 9y ago
  It is still all cash. Govt. removed 1000 INR note, only to introduce a 2000 INR note. This was done as a surprise move under foolish assumption that people hoarding black money, would lose all and we'll get a fresh start. Naturally people being smarter then government, found ways to transfer it all taking 5-10% in laundering charges.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    Can you elaborate on how laundering it was possible? Genuinely interested.
    - blackoil 9y ago
      1. One the day demonetization was announced at 8PM, all jewelers were open till till 12 and sold gold with post dated delivery. 2. Till next few days, most retailers were doing backdated bills for large ticket items. 3. In India lot of people didn't had bank a/c. To allow them to convert old currency, people were allowed to convert cash upto 4k INR, by just showing any ID. Bank managers used stash of IDs they had collected over years, to convert huge amount of cash to new notes. Apart from this, local mafia used millions of poor to get the cash converted. These are common and publicly known methods.

sumedh 9y ago

> 1. Corruption 2. Inequality How about actually catching bringing back people who have fled the country like Nirav Modi and Mallya or how about making sure a celebrity like Salman Khan goes to jail.

thewhitetulip 9y ago
Lol when the media did their job for once after 2014, reporting on norav Modi The govt intelligently stifled free speech by making good on the death of a film star. Tada! Nobody reports on Nirav Modi anymore Also, the judge who found Salamn as guilty was transferred a day after he pronounced the statement and the other judge, presumably close to BJP gave Salman bail. 80other judgea are transferred But does the media report on it? No

duxup 9y ago

How does Aadhaar stop corruption? You think the corrupt are just going to check in with their fingerprints and "Oh man you caught me?" This seems like a system that will just hit those with lesser means. I'm not sure I see that as equality or something that would stop corruption.

realandreskytt 9y ago
A computer cant be bribed. Move transactions online, cut out the middleman and corruption goes down. To do this, you need a strong national identity scheme. Aashaar is a good start but would need to be augmented with derived authentication mechanisms (preferably pki) to reduce reliance on the biometrics
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > A computer cant be bribed. The people responsible for it can, though.
- intended 9y ago
  Security failure always moves to the weakest link. The issue with bribery is always a differential of power = rent seeking behavior. This makes aadhar the enabler of corruption, not the remover of it, since now the State is so deeply intertwined in your life that it is inextricable. Aadhar will long term make things more corrupt. The current levels of corruption will look childish - it returns us to pre 1980 levels of corruption
- duxup 9y ago
  I really don't think this is all that well thought out of a system. I have my doubts that the corruption that really plagues a nation occurs at a sort of point of sale like system that is being developed here. You can still bribe a judge ... politician, government official just fine off the grid.

vijaybritto 9y ago

Enforcing law and order should take away corruption from the country, not a high risk scheme like this. I'm not really comfortable with linking anything because this govt literally gets away with murder. These things only enable them to pin point us easily when we resist. I voted for them despite my friends' advice. Seriously regret it now. There are numerous countries in the world who have a very low rate of corruption without forcing the citizens to enroll in a scheme like this. If you think digitizing would reduce corruption you cannot be more mistaken. Its only a matter of time before they figure out other ways. It will reduce only when the citizens respect/fear law and order. This scheme has a lot of power more than we can comprehend and I don't want it under corrupt hands. As you said, from a person who is so insecure about his own educational qualification that he has lied with a fake degree and does not allow a fair probe into it.

siddharth-shah 9y ago
>"There are numerous countries in the world who have a very low rate of corruption without forcing the citizens to enroll in a scheme like this." Just curious, can you name them and provide sources.
- vijaybritto 9y ago
  Note the countries with the least corruption: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2016 http://www.transparency.org/cpi2016 Compare with the data in this article: https://scroll.in/article/851282/are-countries-with-a-poor-democratic-record-more-likely-to-mandate-an-aadhaar-like-id https://scroll.in/article/851282/are-countries-with-a-poor-d... The graphs show the data excellently.

vr46 9y ago

I agree that this will solve a lot of problems, despite my reservations about the system. A few years ago, I spent three months interviewing and photographing many of the nomadic and scheduled tribes of Gujarat, which made for a good example of disenfranchised people in India generally: lack of voter id or ration cards, which made it hard or impossible to receive assistance, work, medical care, and attention in general from the authorities. Huge efforts by organizations such as VSSM and Janpath to help tribal people obtain their correct papers literally changed their lives. It gave them political influence as a large group of voters; it gave them access to applying for land to make permanent settlements. One group of people that were very upset with these efforts must be apoplectic with rage over Aadhaar: greedy and corrupt representatives in panchayats. No longer would they be the sole conduit for money, food, work and representation. My €0.02

intended 9y ago
Wait a little. Indians are very very good at thinking out of the box, and specialize in working against rules. Its our national past time to be honest. In many cases, people will let you take the money and then will just pressure you for it. Aadhar does not solve that. Cheaters (which is what corruption is) basically adapt to rules. Your assumption is that things will remain the same. They will not. Aadhar achieves nothing, because the core issue we have is enforcement of the law at both the center and the periphery. This means autonomy of the police force, expansion of the judiciary. You will not find one party advocating for this. Instead the parties know that Indians love the idea and concept of magic bullets, and they sell that as the product.

intended 9y ago

Aadhar does not solve any of those issues. You forget - corruption or cheating is an evolving system. There is no set of static rules which govern the world. Cheaters as a result always adapt and find an edge. Finally - The massively hurtful demonitzation exercise failed to uncover large amounts of hidden cash. While everyone who worked with money knew this, the lay people still believe in magic bullets and tech optimism to solve what are inherently human issues. -----

krtkush 9y ago

> people with influence are not exempt. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/aadhaar-card-mandatory-for-all-modi-government-bjp-ministers-rti-1067162-2017-10-18 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/aadhaar-card-mandatory...