Saturday, February 13, 2016

Aadhaar should be only for Indian Residents

There are demands from the Non Resident Indian(NRI,PIO) Community for aadhaar enrollment of themselves abroad. This issue goes beyond national identification systems and has security implications. I feel it should not be allowed due to the following reasons:

1) Venue of enrollment and sharing of biometric details:
Any country which hosts an enrollment center for collecting biometric details would in all likelihood ask for a copy of the biometric measurements taken. This could endanger the program. As not all foreign governments are friendly and trustworthy we cannot take chances.

2) Presence in India:
One of the foremost and indisputable aspects of enrollment into aadhaar is that all enrollments are happening within the country under controlled conditions. If enrollment is taken out of the country it will be impossible to prove that possession of aadhaar numbers implied the person was in India. This loophole could be exploited by illegal immigrants to claim that they were Persons of Indian Origin living in other countries like Bangladesh and have enrolled in their country itself and since returned to India.

3) Spurious enrollment data:
All that is being done currently to check the veracity of enrollment packets is just biometric uniqueness and the responsibility of demographic data accuracy is on the registrars. If foreign origin registrars are taken in and in case some of them for unknown reasons turn to tampering with bio-metric enrollment devices, may be unlimited number of unique bio-metric prints could be generated which when fed into the system over a long term cause it to be overwhelmed with fake and duplicate Unique numbers(Aadhaars).

4) Authentication requests from overseas:
While Aadhaar is a program to identify Indians In India, if overseas Indians are on-boarded then authentication requests from overseas may lead to violation of privacy or crimes responsibility of which could not be put on the criminal alone but also the identification system too and even worse punishment would need government to government cooperation(we already have enough enemies).

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

OMCs should collaborate with wallet companies and payment banks

Several years ago I remember the government tried to introduce card reading machines at petrol stations and they were not a huge success due to cumbersome procedure. Its probably time to revisit the idea but with slight change in modality.
Oil Marketing Companies can easily convert a major portion of their sales into cashless transactions. I usually go to the nearest petrol station to get change for five hundred or thousand rupee notes. It once occurred to me how much of cash transaction all these petrol/diesel sales generate and the added work of managing the cash. With increasing use of smartphones, a majority of whom have wallets, Is it not good if such people are offered cashless transactions by using their wallet?


A QR code scan would be all that would be needed, to pay to the fuel service station. Some sort of pull transaction may also be made where the vehicle owner/service station personnel enters an email id or mobile number and gets a request for payment in the payer's wallet application. Then on-wards a simple password authentication is all that is needed to drive away.
It should be even possible for people to pay ahead of time for the fuel and just drive away after the fill.