Wow, they are going to be the first country to self-consciously grapple with all kinds of fascinating privacy issues that emerge from this kind of system. In most countries, as far as I know, privacy depends on the crappiness of government IT and the difficulty of systems integration. It's mostly accidental. In a powerful, well-designed system, you have to decide to have privacy. This is an exciting prospect -- India is by far not the worst country to be investigating these issues. They are democratic and are familiar with the problems of corrupt officials. I think people in countries where corruption is not a problem are too willing to trust the good intentions of their government officials. It's very educational to see how ruthless and venal people are when systems are not in place to stop them.

I had predicted here ( http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2009/06/all-honourable-men.htm... ):

"As the good old days of inflated head counts and billing rates comes to an end for Indian outsourcing companies, the big outsourcing companies will bid for, and push for huge local government projects."

It's amazing how uncritically such huge projects are treated by the press in India - privacy issues, potential conflict of interest for the person leading this effort (Nilekani). Public discussion in India in general is very worshipful of proposals like this or the usage of voting machines - there is little to no discussion of the meta issues like privacy, corruption, etc.

ID cards are a bad idea everywhere. Loss of privacy; loss of the presumption of innocence. Being required to produce the card by aggressive cops. Corruption and collusion between fat cats and government.

The cards will be hacked and sold on the black market almost immediately upon being released (if that ever happens -- it probably won't even after billions of rupees have been spent). Hence they'd make ID fraud and terrorism easier, not harder.

The article mentions 20 different forms of ID which are currently recognised. This sounds better to me. Historians, for example, prefer several pieces of evidence which can be cross-referenced to support a story rather than just one piece.

Just as it's not a good idea to allow private companies to collect data on people without their explicit consent, so it's a bad idea to let the government do so. Actually, it's an important check on government power not to let this happen. And I think many politicans involved in such schemes realise that ID projects won't reach completion. They either think it's a neat and simple idea, or in the worst cases they're out to build empires and make profit for their 'friends'.

The article includes a good discussion of the governmental issues involved in implementing this plan in India. I'd love to see links to articles about this from the Indian press.

Opinion piece in the Times of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Columnists/SA-Aiy...

Instead of wasting(http://tr.im/pX87) 10,000 crores tax payers money on this UID project they could have issued PASSPORTS to all Indians at a nominal fee of 10 rupees.

For a project of this scale the India Govt. has allocated just above 20 million $ (100 Crore in India). Not sure what to say.

1.2 Billion cards? They better not use a smallint as a primary key then