The pro: There have been significant fiscal benefits - fake personas have been completely eliminated in the welfare schemes that are aadhar linked, saving a lot for the taxpayers.
The con: Government has all your biometrics, and can technically mine data from connected services to build a very detailed profile of you (hypothetically).
IMO, both sides have valid points, and so it ends up being about which side the ruling government wants to fall towards.
Most (all?) savings claims by govt are at best projected numbers. For those interested in an analysis of the savings claim and some of the other myths propagated by govt, see the 3 part analysis by Anand (https://twitter.com/iam_anandv) linked below
> The pro: There have been significant fiscal benefits - fake personas have been completely eliminated in the welfare schemes that are aadhar linked, saving a lot for the taxpayers.
Sorry, you seem to be misinformed. If you look at Rethink Aadhaar [1] and its Twitter feed [2], you'd see how state governments were weeding out fake personas even without and before Aadhaar, and that Aadhaar by itself didn't make a big dent. All the claims of savings have reasons other than deduplication (including lies and excluding hundreds of thousands of genuine beneficiaries from welfare that they're legally entitled to).
What Aadhaar has really done is excluded poor people, manual laborers whose biometrics cannot be verified, those who live far from where their entitlements are given (forcing them to visit multiple times instead of working to earn money or live their lives), those who're in areas of poor network connectivity (which is really huge in India). People have literally died, because Aadhaar and the governments' blatant disregard of the Supreme Court orders to keep it optional have excluded them and treated them as non-persons and non-citizens.
Sorry, after reading up about all this for quite sometime, I feel so strongly about what's been happening that I'm going to be quite harsh here. Aadhaar is a genocide enabler that the government is using and turning a blind eye to. One cannot even take anybody to court for any failures or identity thefts on this matter, because that right is solely reserved for the UIDAI through the Aadhaar Act. And UIDAI would promptly respond or take action only if you're a famous cricketer (like Dhoni). The rest of them can keep trying the call center number 1947 and pray that the Gods listen and do something.
> There have been significant fiscal benefits - fake personas have been completely eliminated in the welfare schemes that are aadhar linked, saving a lot for the taxpayers.
I'm deeply suspicious of any unqualified statements. It is extremely hard, if not impossible to prove your proposition.
Usha Ramanathan has noted many times that the so called 'savings' are due to two factors: global fall in oil prices, and more worryingly due to the denial of services from biometric issues.
Someone here worried it can be use d for genocide, You know what ? It's already happening.
> There have been significant fiscal benefits - fake personas have been completely eliminated in the welfare schemes that are aadhar linked, saving a lot for the taxpayers.
Oh I didn't know that. I used to blame politicians for our sorry state.
Please check the links posted by tryprasannan above and also https://rethinkaadhaar.in/ . All the savings numbers by the government are bogus claims. The poor continue to be affected by quantity and quality fraud when it comes to subsidized food entitlements. Aadhaar cannot solve that. It has added one more layer for corruption in many places instead.
The con: Government has all your biometrics, and can technically mine data from connected services to build a very detailed profile of you (hypothetically).
IMO, both sides have valid points, and so it ends up being about which side the ruling government wants to fall towards.