India is an expert at imposing oppressive laws and policies without thinking through them much.
A centralized ID makes it easier to verify identity, given that alternative local systems of identification were easily falsified and used to siphon money away from welfare programs by local politicians of all parties.
Before Aadhaar, to get your PAN card you often had to deal with your local panchayat, and that was often a compromised method with local panchayat functionaries requiring bribes or straight up ignoring individuals.
Furthermore, because the local level was so compromised, it was easy to create either fake IDs which was often used for siphoning funds.
Digital/Identity Libertarianism is a Veblen good when the absolute majority of the population is dependent on government benefits and subsidies.
1. Friction in getting the card in the first place, especially in cases that are out of the ordinary.
2. Extensive and mandatory use of the card for routine non-governmental things that are not benefits or bank accounts. This is more pervasive than one may realize.
This is common in almost every country that has central ID system. Businesses want easy way to track someone using Primary Key that doesn't change. It's even bigger benefit to business if it's Primary Key that's same across all businesses.
Only way to prevent it is having laws that ban use of the number in business dealings but few countries have those laws.
Not true. The US has a Social Security Number but it is not needed for everyday business use. It is not needed for getting a cell phone number, for example. In India, the Aadhaa card is needed for getting a cell phone number.
Nope. I got a new cellular device on a national carrier last year without giving up my SSN.
SSA is de facto used as one, but it isn't actually mandated.
The Aadhaar system is based on Malaysia and Singapore's National Registration ID Card (MyKad/IC respectively) system, as both countries had similar needs to India's for distributing benefits and validating identity.
The total cost of implementing Aadhar system is less than couple of months of SSA admin expenses. Median per capita income tax in US is $15K and in India it would be 200-300 dollars. The point is at that level of revenue and expenses the quality of service, privacy, sensitivity to ones belief, one can expect from government is very low.
Complaining about Aadhar is more in tune of complaining about wine selection at Dollar store. This even if obviously true hardly rises to level of public welfare.
It’s just that while it is legal to get one, each telco will make it extremely hard to do so.
Poland is like that for example. Our PESEL number encodes gender by whether one of the digits is odd or even. People with a legally-sanctioned gender change get a new PESEL, and a lot of systems aren't prepared for that.
The Gender change process here is extremely long and arduous, and the number of transgender people was very low until recently, so most institutions weren't prepared to deal with it.
Accept the lossage. No system is foolproof, follow the Pareto principle and that's it.
Unfortunately that one is hard to sell to voters, especially as "we're going to eradicate fraud" is a very popular platform of conservative/authoritarian politicians that just use fraud as an excuse to develop repressive systems.
At the end of the day, India's model of development is based on much more statist Japan, South Korea, and Singapore's, as most advising, developmental grants, and FDI in India is furnished by these 3 countries.
While India may speak English, it's administrative system and legal system is closer to Malaysia and Singapore's in jurisprudence and central control, and as such, administrative leadership in India tends to look at Singapore as a model - heck, Narendra Modi was mentored by Lee Kuan Yew when he was CM of Gujarat.
Aadhaar itself was developed in coordination with Singapore, and is directly based on Malaysia's MyKad and Singapore's NRIC.
Aadhaar has had disastrous pitfalls with rollout, but it is complete at this point - especially with COVID acting as a forcing function.
[0] - https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/176312/1/icrier-wp-2...
Also, I got my COVID-19 vaccination without Aadhaar. It wasn't asked anywhere. I'm not sure what you're referring to as a connection between them.
Not sure what the right term’d be but it isn’t good nevertheless.
That's a partial view into it. It's also required for getting basic things that have nothing to do with the government, e.g. a cell phone number, and this is an example of the oppressive problem with it.
In good faith, how can you look at that and say that Aadhar data has been used for the benefit of citizens?
Despite often being "not mandatory", reality will disagree with you.