Wow, they are going to be the first country to self-consciously grapple with all kinds of fascinating privacy issues that emerge from this kind of system. In most countries, as far as I know, privacy depends on the crappiness of government IT and the difficulty of systems integration. It's mostly accidental. In a powerful, well-designed system, you have to decide to have privacy. This is an exciting prospect -- India is by far not the worst country to be investigating these issues. They are democratic and are familiar with the problems of corrupt officials. I think people in countries where corruption is not a problem are too willing to trust the good intentions of their government officials. It's very educational to see how ruthless and venal people are when systems are not in place to stop them.
I live in India & I agree - there is horrendous amount of corruption. And the unique identification number project might not change anything when it comes to illegal immigrants, terrorists.
However as the article highlights this would give me one power for which I am okay to bear the grunt of privacy issues: I can (at least proactively) ensure my identity is not misused & if it is, I can at least be aware of it - stop it & probably dig in more.
Right now I have a ration card which is particularly necessary to get a cooking gas connection (which btw is of scarce availability - again corruption). There might be a person living at my native or hometown who is aware I am not availing the facility and probably using a duplicate card or something. There is no system to quickly check if this is happening. With the new initiative I hope it would be difficult to duplicate & easy to track. At the least these processes will get digitized the right way, given Nilekani is heading it & not yet another uneducated/ corrupt politician.
In the US, citizens don't have to pay bribes, perhaps with the exception of getting government business. You don't have to pay bribes to get a marriage license, get a crime investigated, get your garbage collected, get fair treatment in court, or get your child admitted to a good school.
Larger-scale, more obscure corruption thrives. Everybody knows that most political campaign contributions are made with the expectation of a return on investment. If you're an ordinary citizen, though, you don't have to worry about being shaken down by a bureaucrat or a traffic cop.
Just as important as the factual lack of pervasive bribery is the lack of the expectation of pervasive bribery.
I took a group of Indian engineers to the immigration office (Japan) to get some paperwork done, once. The particular type of paperwork they needed has a $40 filing fee.
"So Patrick, how much does [the paperwork] cost?"
"There is a [$40] filing fee."
"Right, and how much will the clerk want? Maybe I should ask for it instead of you. I can pretend to be a poor Indian, you are wearing a business suit so he'll surely want more."
My mind vapor locked for about half a minute there. I mean, you know in a theoretical sense that bribery happens in Western democracies, but you certainly don't expect it to ever hit your daily life. I grew up in Chicago, which is about as corrupt as America gets, and the notion of paying extra for e.g. a driver's license a) wouldn't occur to me to try and b) would bring down an administration if it were discovered (it has in Illinois).
Incidentally, the Japanese immigration office doesn't take money directly for the forms. You go over to someone who sells revenue stamps, buy a stamp, and affix it to your form. This is a brilliant centuries-old hack design specifically to make corruption difficult -- because money doesn't normally change hands between the applicant and person with decisionmaking authority, there is no opportunity for the clerk to pocket the fees and there is no chance that "a little extra" on top of the fees would go unnoticed.
It is not just the basic facilities. Corruption hits in a lot of other ways also.
The traffic sucks because most traffic police are jerking off somewhere. If you want to get something done (e.g. setup a business) you should know someone with influence. A new risk in big cities is if you own a land there is a risk of the property being forcibly occupied by a thug and the police wouldn't do much.
If you read the comment properly - I am not blaming the system. Only pointing the current ills in it and hoping he UID scheme cuts down at least some of them.
I'm curious which countries your are thinking of where government corruption is not a problem?
It is less of a problem in some countries than others, by more than an order of magnitude. Transparency International is one organization that publishes studies of corruption in different countries.
