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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

What is the alternative for providing direct benefits without lossage?

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.

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> What is the alternative for providing direct benefits without lossage?

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.

Pre-Aadhaar, 40-50% of overall welfare system distributions was lost due to corruption at the last mile [0]

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...

And what is the post-Aadhaar loss? Nobody knows, because there's no accounting. We're still in the "don't allow critical examination of Aadhaar" era of this regime.

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.

There is no alternative afaik. The issues however are:

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.

>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.

Now the real fun begins when the primary key almost never changes, and is considered never-changing by most businesses and computer systems, but there is an extremely small number of cases when it does, in fact, change.

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.

> This is common in almost every country that has central ID system.

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.

It's required for getting postpaid cellular plan. It's also required to do banking so credit/debit card you give them, they likely can use that to backtrack.

Biggest one is probably health insurance. I'd be surprised if you can get any (private, employer-sponsored, ACA exchange, Medicaid, Medicare) health insurance plan without an SSN. Medicare at least makes sense since it is administered by the Social Security Administration.

It's required for getting postpaid cellular plan.

Nope. I got a new cellular device on a national carrier last year without giving up my SSN.

Plan, not device. If you have a plan, they have your SSN already and ran soft credit check likely when you bought your device.

It was a new plan, too. This is my first device with this carrier.

Right. If you are a rich country there is enough margin in business or resources for government agencies to use alternatives with people who don't provide SSN.

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.

The US doesn't actually have a central ID system.

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.

Don't know the details but the cell phone number thing is due to terrorism reasons and mandated by the government, not due to individual businesses choosing to. Used to be you could just buy sim cards using cash.

You can get a SIM without an Aadhaar in India. I have one, and the author does have one as well.

It’s just that while it is legal to get one, each telco will make it extremely hard to do so.

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