Great Idea. Won't Work. (Score 2, Interesting)

I read the news and was quite impressed by it. It seems like a great idea, having basic information about the citizens available, and being able to provide better service using it. And if implemented it will be a great help for the people too, being able to have a single ID to serve as their Ration cards, Voter ID, PAN cards, Driving license, Electricity bill payments etc.

The most immediate problem however is that the infrastructure to utilize this kind of information is absent, and is not going to be widely available for several years to come. The vital social services that the govt. intends to provide to the poorest are not in a very good shape, and identity information is the least of the problems. The IT infrastructure required to facilitate interactions via IDs is limited to big cities.

I don't have much concern about the breach of privacy. I expose several orders of magnitude greater information about myseff on internet and social networks than what the govt. plans to collect. And this information has been collected through National Population Census since several decades. It will just be more accessible now.

Also, how are they going to generate and distribute these ID cards? In a country of over a billion people, where a significant portion of the population doesn't even have voter ID cards, its going to add several layer of more bureaucracy, corruption and red tape. As someone already pointed out, they don't have any means to enforce it on those who don't want it, and the middle class will be the one to suffer the most.

At the risk of sounding defeatist, I still maintain, its a nice idea, but both impractical and premature.