Some questions that come to mind….

Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) while addressing the International Newsmedia Marketing Association said that the fundamental idea behind creating the UID project was the fact that Indians were becoming more mobile, travelling from rural areas to cities or migrating overseas to find jobs. The Infosys co-founder said UID was trying to bring about a change by putting people's identities on the cloud. This would 'untether' people from a physical location, allowing them to move around the country. (source: The Times of India article Media companies must assume all consumers are young and mobile while strategising: Nandan Nilekani)

This brings some questions to my mind on whether this is really a progressive move and I wonder what the plan is to mitigate all the risk factors (and we’ll talk about the conspiracy theory later) that are associated with the move. Let’s look at what happens in our precious Western hemisphere that undoubtedly gave us this idea to ape from – talking of the Social Security Number/Card (SSN) here. You cannot do anything without an SSN (unless you are on a business trip) in the United States of America staring from getting a bank account, renting an apartment, getting utility services  to buying a car (you can, of course, buy groceries with cash without an SSN but you can get robbed of your cash too, just as easily!). So this SSN becomes your identity, 9 digits that are forced upon you as definitions of your existence. And what came of it?

In 2009, 9.9 million adults were victims of identity fraud, up 22% from 2008. Merchants are paying $100 billion in fraud losses due to unauthorized transactions and fees/interest. We have over the years had our variations of IDs moving from the Ration Card through the License, Passport to the PAN card. I looked far and wide but I could not find any statistics for ID theft in India but here is what I found.

• According to the data compiled by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the money lost to such scams has doubled in the past four years. In the current financial year, banks lost Rs.2,289 crore (till December ‘11), while the loss was Rs.1,057 crore in 2007-08. (Source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/banks-lose-rs-2289-crore-in-fraud-cases/1/131090.html) I am guessing a significant part of this is perpetrated by fraudulent PAN cards. When PAN cards started circulation there were paper flyers all over major and minor cities for getting a PAN card for Rs. 100 without any documentation. 
• The statistics, while no formal sources are available, are staggering in terms of Passport and related Visa frauds. WikiLeaks exposed a cable recently that said this about the Indian Passports.

The design of the Indian passport incorporates many good security features that would normally lead to a more favorable rating of this document’s vulnerability. The problem lies in production inconsistency and vulnerable source documents. Quality control is lax at production locations. Thus, genuine passports sometimes are partially or completely missing security features. Genuine passports issued on the same day at the same place can look entirely different…. The only documentation required for a passport is proof of birth and proof of residency. Easily reproduced school records can suffice for the former, while a bank statement or utility bill can be used to “prove” the latter. Although police are supposed to verify the information on each application by visiting the applicant’s neighborhood and interviewing neighbors, such checks are often cursory at best. In most cases, police officials will only check warrant records and then hand over a clean record to passport authorities….” (Source: http://www.travel-impact-newswire.com/2011/04/wikileaks-cables-expose-indian-visa-fraud-tactics/#ixzz231wZmMOW)

Of the Indian license and the Ration Card, the less said the lesser shall be the embarrassment. And looks like the fraud in Aadhar has already started facing fraud problems as seven persons, including four Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS) employees and a ration shop dealer, have been booked by the police in the Aadhaar card fraud. The technical foundations are unproven in ensuring critical authentication, immunity from systemic fraud and data proliferation/theft. Hence the questions literally begs a response as to what the rationale is of behind spending thousands of crores of Rupees to create another ID platform instead of making the existing ones more robust. Because to me it seems that the more Hi-Tech you get the more the scope for fraud and misuse, and more the cost of fraud. The only purpose it might serve is to provide a significant boost to employment numbers. It’s like the employment boost the US gets every time they decide to take a census it is meaningless but the stick market gets a temporary adrenaline rush and everyone suffers from a misinformed sense of purpose and happiness.

And this brings me to the what might sound akin to a conspiracy theory, but I would rather not be tagged. Although with the number of tags going around already there is no way to run and hide but this is one thing, if successful (there is always the remote chance that this will succeed under extraordinary circumstances) this might be the chain that Government and possibly every private organization wanting to track your spending & usage patterns will forever hold to your neck. And I am not comfortable with that thought at all. Will you be comfortable with someone always watching you – what you spend, where you spend, and possibly where you go, whatever your do? And pay taxes to get such extreme breach of privacy implemented on to you?