R
Rudhran
Guest
[h=1]Brain child of MMS…. and now NaMo reaping the benefits…..[/h][h=1]The scheme had alreadygone through lot of legal debate and criticism..[/h][h=1]Aadhaar wins World Bank praise amid ‘big brother’ fears[/h]Last week’s landslide win in UP elections could embolden Prime Minister Narendra Modi to push Aadhaar beyond its early cost-saving goal
Mumbai: A new internet is being built: it has 1.1 billion users, a third of the world wide web. Indian banks are running transactions on it and Microsoft has embedded it into Skype.
The biometric identifier program Aadhaar—or “foundation” in Hindi—has taken on a life of its own, authenticating loans and job seekers, pensions and money transfers across India.
Excerpts:
Other countries are also looking at similar programs, but research shows it’s best to develop one standardized system so people can carry their IDs wherever they go in the world, said Paul Romer, chief economist at the World Bank.
“The system in India is the most sophisticated that I’ve seen,” Romer said. “It’s the basis for all kinds of connections that involve things like financial transactions. It could be good for the world if this became widely adopted.”
…..
About 99% of adult Indians hold an Aadhaar ID that links to some 84 government services, which will soon include the whole of India’s food distribution system, the world’s biggest welfare program. The Aadhaar is saving Modi’s administration about $2 billion a year and this could rise to $7 billion by March 2018, or 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, according to research firm CLSA.
The private sector is also benefiting from Aadhaar. Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, controlled by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, sold 100 million sim cards in six months or about seven each second—by using this system to verify customers’ IDs, while Google is in talks with the government to use Aadhaar.
…….
There has been no incident of misuse of Aadhaar biometrics leading to identity theft and financial loss during the last five years, the issuing authority said in a statement on 5 March, in response to a spate of news reports about breaches. However in a briefing it said it had shut 12 private websites and 12 mobile applications and was on the verge of closing 26 more for illegally obtaining Aadhaar numbers or enrolment details.
The debates surrounding Aadhaar—identity proofing, privacy—are similar to those playing out in the wrangling over the revision of standards governing the Internet, as government and business struggle to find the perfect tool to authenticate people’s identity and safeguard their data.
The problem is not so much with Aadhaar, said Romer, who founded a technology company in 2000, but with the many private firms collecting large amounts of data about people.
“It should be part of the policy of the government to give individuals some control over the data that the private firms collect and some control over how that data is used,” he said. Bloomberg
Source: http://www.livemint.com/Politics/Y0...World-Bank-praise-amid-big-brother-fears.html
Mumbai: A new internet is being built: it has 1.1 billion users, a third of the world wide web. Indian banks are running transactions on it and Microsoft has embedded it into Skype.
The biometric identifier program Aadhaar—or “foundation” in Hindi—has taken on a life of its own, authenticating loans and job seekers, pensions and money transfers across India.
Excerpts:
Other countries are also looking at similar programs, but research shows it’s best to develop one standardized system so people can carry their IDs wherever they go in the world, said Paul Romer, chief economist at the World Bank.
“The system in India is the most sophisticated that I’ve seen,” Romer said. “It’s the basis for all kinds of connections that involve things like financial transactions. It could be good for the world if this became widely adopted.”
…..
About 99% of adult Indians hold an Aadhaar ID that links to some 84 government services, which will soon include the whole of India’s food distribution system, the world’s biggest welfare program. The Aadhaar is saving Modi’s administration about $2 billion a year and this could rise to $7 billion by March 2018, or 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, according to research firm CLSA.
The private sector is also benefiting from Aadhaar. Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, controlled by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, sold 100 million sim cards in six months or about seven each second—by using this system to verify customers’ IDs, while Google is in talks with the government to use Aadhaar.
…….
There has been no incident of misuse of Aadhaar biometrics leading to identity theft and financial loss during the last five years, the issuing authority said in a statement on 5 March, in response to a spate of news reports about breaches. However in a briefing it said it had shut 12 private websites and 12 mobile applications and was on the verge of closing 26 more for illegally obtaining Aadhaar numbers or enrolment details.
The debates surrounding Aadhaar—identity proofing, privacy—are similar to those playing out in the wrangling over the revision of standards governing the Internet, as government and business struggle to find the perfect tool to authenticate people’s identity and safeguard their data.
The problem is not so much with Aadhaar, said Romer, who founded a technology company in 2000, but with the many private firms collecting large amounts of data about people.
“It should be part of the policy of the government to give individuals some control over the data that the private firms collect and some control over how that data is used,” he said. Bloomberg
Source: http://www.livemint.com/Politics/Y0...World-Bank-praise-amid-big-brother-fears.html
