On Wednesday 13 September 2006 09:33 pm, Rony wrote:
Dinesh Shah wrote:
On 9/12/06, jtd wrote:
Who are the issuers?
- Passport - an upmarket version of the above
Very few have this document and it's costly and time consuming to acquire.
That is why it is still considered a valid proof of id by many Govt. and private organizations. PAN number is only an extension for economic data records. The details that we have to furnish to get a passport and the police verification are quite ok, except that we still have no system to verify the person's biological id.
There are many people with three different passports all issued by the Passport dept. However it is not as easy as 10 yrs ago and costs lacs compared to few thousand ten yrs ago. But u are very right about the verification being reasonable. However the verification process will become completely unmageable when mandated for everybody.
So instead of starting from scratch, why not build a layer over the passport system that already has international validity, and have the passport authority as the National records keeper with properly defined responsibilities. That will save a lot of trouble.
That will still not solve the id verification problem. But at least you have the essential framework (save verification ) in place.
The need for dna is to eliminate verification and automate the process. although the matching process is very compute intensive at the moment it will improve as knowledge & code and computing power increases. The drawing of relationships can be automatic thus spoofing becomes almost impossible even with complete abscence of physical verification. As usual though the corner cases pointed out earlier will be a big spanner in the works. 25 to 30% of kids have biological fathers different from their legal fathers according to a UK study. On second thought In our case it will only cause embarassment but should not in any way affect the verifiability and authenticity.