The Project:
The Unique ID Project is a project to assign each and every individual, "dwelling" in India a unique number(total 16 digits, 12 public, 4 private).
They will be taking the following inputs:
Name
Age
Permanent Address
finger-prints of all 10 fingers
iris scan
[/list]
They intend to finish numbering 600 million people by the end of this government's term.
The Purpose:
Mainly to eradicate impersonation for various govt schemes and to prevent people from opening multiple bank accounts or show capital gains with different names.
My View:
While we were able to point out loop-holes, which may still enable impersonation on a grand scale by big fishes, the person who will be hit the most is the middle class Indian. That Indian, who tries to evade, on an average Rs. 2000 of, income tax by opening accounts with different names(eg. Manmohan Singh, M Singh, M S Singh, Manmohan S, etc etc...) with different PAN numbers to avoid taxation on their "income from bank interest" & "Capital Gains".
Its good to see India going the US way in appointing professionals in Government. People should not be encouraged to evade tax. But I am most worried about whether this whole drama will once again result in exclusively hitting the pockets of middle class. Time and again, we have seen the government more inclined to tax income which is easier to track(salary) rather than the income which is more necessary to tax. I am quite certain that people like Ramalinga Raju and his associates,Raja,Kalmadi and co. will still find ways to tweak their iris scans or finger prints by a simple software and will have thousands of benami accounts and property.