Ahh Americans.

I went to a "very good (Catholic) school" in my country (India) and the school system here was the other extreme. Nothing like mass punishment (the caning of 250 boys at a time) to build character (and camaraderie). Seriously, our system is fucked up, but yours ... well, I feel a mixture of contempt, laughter and sympathy for you guys.

Kids answering back to teachers? Kids hitting teacher? Kids cheating in tests without knowing that they would probably be expelled and no other school would take you in? Teachers not even allowed to scold kids??

Yeah we have some strict ideas on education but at least over here, the kids are desperate to learn.

maan talk about misplaced priorities.

I'm an Indian, long-time /. vet and a lawyer by training.

India's Constitution has a different method of doing things from the American one; it chooses to emphasise or list Constitutional Rights and there is a "holy trinity" of Fundamental Rights which cannot ever be amended.

The Constitution is a living document, having been amended 94 times in 59 years, and the coders seem to have settled on a stable codebase in the last few years, with only minor version changes.

This may shock Americans but there is no constitutionally explicit Right to Privacy from the Government. I would propose that there's a far greater reliance on and therefore, necessary trust of the Government, in India, as compared to America. With starvation deaths occurring in India even in this day and age, the proposition seems to be something like "Who cares if you have all my personal details and if you're corrupt? Just give me my one subsistence meal a day and it's all okay."

Five years ago, the government launched a scheme to give rural Indians employment for a fixed number of days a year. This was decried as wasteful, leaky, wrong-headed etc but in some places, it has had some impact.

The problem is that the sub-contractors who the government uses for public works such as roads, bridges etc. often manipulate the muster rolls to skim off a portion of the money that would otherwise go to very poor people.

In this context, identity theft and the in-principle prickliness of "gosh darnit! i don't want teh guvmint to kno my pay-per-view habits!!!" is laughably trivial, when compared to the fact that people -- entire families, in some cases -- are dying of starvation.

I'd say that if this scheme saves the lives of even a thousand of India's poor, it's worth it, invasions of privacy, identity theft and all.

Note #1 To contextualise, we have over a billion people and the number of poor Indians (those earning less than the global average of US$1.25 a day) is 150% of the population of the entire United States.

Note #2 The Indian government considers a person below the poverty line if s/he earns less than US$0.25 a day. There are about 280 million Indians that are that poor, give or take a few tens of millions.

So, yeah... identity theft? privacy? meh.