Where are they giving up liberty. You have to look at the problems from an India perspective not a first world one. Personal identification is a solved problem here but in India lack of trust and lack of access prevents many people from gaining liberty. This system will allow a greater number of people to access government programs, education, and financial tools like bank accounts. That being said there needs to be some safe guards in place to prevent the police state scenarios that many here seem to be worried about.

Biometric security has always been a disaster which is why real projects using it almost never end up being realized. The article portrays it as if the reason India is the first to do this is because they are somehow uniquely able to take advantage of technology. The reality is that the reason they are the first is that everybody realized how flawed it is.

In terms of liberty - a biometric id is, by definition, an "involuntary" identity. It's something you're unable to change or refuse to yield, even if you choose to. A person with a non-biometric identity can freely destroy all forms of that identity and then they cannot be identified any more by it. They have the freedom to produce it when they wish to be identified, and to choose not to when they wish to remain anonymous. A biometric identity is a non "opt out" identity. It can never be changed or altered, and can be forcibly read by anybody with physical control over you. Hence there is a great loss of liberty in a biometric identity, and when you really think it through, almost no advantages that can't be obtained from a non-biometric identity.

I'm Indian, I've looked at it from an Indian perspective and plain logic tells me this is insane.

Heck leave alone our country men and their talent at finding loopholes or the corruption of our system.

When I know first hand that the debate internally amongst the world bank and nandan nilekani went from trying to tackle the privacy issues to "my role is to give every Indian a number" (second hand quote) my hair stands on end.

Not to mention that the system already creates duplicates and overlaps, which then compound which each subsequent generation.

Or the fact that we already have bad data from outsourcers who just jammed info into the system, or the fact that the laptops were stolen. I think we lost data recently too.

This is just a bad idea.

The word "temporary" is also quite important in that quote, and often omitted.

Exactly the quote that came to my mind too. Sometimes you need to be somewhat absolute and idealistic. I feel sorry for India.