SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
India's Identity Scheme: The Magic Number
from the Economist
...Poverty has many causes, and no simple cure. But one massive problem in India is that few poor people can prove who they are. They have no passport, no driving licence, no proof of address. They live in villages where multitudes share the same name. Their lack of an identity excludes them from the modern economy. They cannot open bank accounts, and no one would be so foolish as to lend them money.
The government offers them all kinds of welfare, but because they lack an identity, they struggle to lay hands on what they have been promised. The state spends a fortune on subsidised grain for the hungry, but an estimated two-thirds of it is stolen or adulterated by middlemen. The government pays for an $8 billion-a-year make-work scheme for the rural poor, but much of the cash ends up in the capacious pockets of officials who invent imaginary "ghost workers."
Suppose those thieving middlemen were obliged to deliver grain, not to poor people in general but to named individuals who could confirm receipt by scanning their fingerprints? And suppose those ghost workers had to undergo an iris scan before being paid? If poor Indians each had an identity number tied to unique biometric markers, it would be much harder for the powerful to rob them. Sceptics will scoff that the Indian government is far too incompetent to implement such a scheme. But the sceptics are wrong.
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