On Thursday 14 September 2006 12:16 am, Vivek Rai wrote:
I think we need to figure out what this can be used for, before we get into other details.
Absolutely. without compelling reasons for the customer - in this case the government - this will be an academic excercise. And the compelling reasons is not the reasons that citizens have but what the government has. These reasons may well be contradictory to the users needs. Dinesh will have to work very hard to rconcile the two.
unique id for a citizen? well.. we dont have any unique ID so far.. US has a social security #, UK has a national Insurance #... maybe this is the major benefit of having such a system in the first place - as it can be a single identity for people having (or not having) various diverse id's .. (passport#, DL#, voter id# (for 18+), PAN# (for the few tax payers)).. why not have some biometric ID to make it really foolproof..
Biometric id other than DNA is not related (some are but more on that later) to upstream (parents), lateral 9siblings) and downstream (children).
but, then you can only design a technical framework to hold this data, and access/amend it. implementation details such as who enters and keeps on updating data would depend on sarkari babus sitting in the villages who are normally happier to exploit and harass the citizens than in serving them.
With DNA a malicious enrollement will not work because of the up and down dependencies. I will be relatively easy to spot sitting on a terminal anywhere rather than require actual physical verification in some remote village.