I think the UID thingie has problems that go far beyond questions like whether M$ is going to get half the pie.
1. Implementing this scheme in a country of India's size is, I think, going to be a quite difficult task. Apart from the question of technology, there is the big question of collecting the actual data from 100 crore plus people. So, it is bound to drag on for some time, and no one is going to be much concerned about the time taken. No other country of this size has, I think, done that so far (since China, I think, has not created UID). We can hope that it will die a natural death. 2. We can be pretty certain that the final cost is going to be something like ten times the estimated cost. I can quickly think of at least two projects in Kerala that have spent an order of magnitude more than they were supposed to and are yet to show a drop of success for the money they spent. One of them is ICT related. So this can easily run into unimaginable figures. And all this to make it possible to give some handouts to some poor people. mmm, pretty convincing, I should say. 3. Such projects in some countries (like the UK and Australia) have been put on hold due to public pressure. Their apprehensions have been loss of privacy and possible misuse of the data. These are, as I see, issues that are equally valid in a developing country. When is the public going to wake up to this and start opposing the scheme? Are we concerned about our private data? 4. What will happen if some data are stolen from the database and misused? And what if that data happens to be about an important or influential or wealthy person? Could this not become a reality considering the ease with which people can be induced to part with information in their possession? Or the database broken into, especially if it is done using Gatesware? I think this could get into many problems. Best -- V. Sasi Kumar Free Software Foundation of India Please visit http://swatantryam.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
