MGNREGS Revamp

MGNREGS is a money guzzler. In this helicopter money scheme all is going waste. Better thing would be to provide income supplement to villagers/sub-urban dwellers via-aadhaar linked methods. What is needed is registration of labour contractors. Just expand the MGNREGS to any job that any organization wants done. Track the payments the organization makes to the person and supplement the income by suitable percentages. The theme or goal here should be to encourage people to stay employed no matter how menial the income. Organizations will be more than happy to keep their employees as they need to pay less. This way govt can partner with the employment providers and create a win win situation for all by better tracking of money flows and income. Enablers and a key requirement would be electronic payments of salaries and wages all across the country.

Retro fitting privacy into aadhaar

Aadhaar project has invited wrath of the privacy advocates and civil society for being lax on security and privacy of individuals. The supreme court is expected to give a verdict tomorrow on whether privacy is a fundamental right or not. Once the supreme court asserts that privacy is a fundamental right although it has not found mention in the constitution(by oversight), the case against the aadhaar validity will continue to be heard by the three judge bench.

Many well intentioned people have suggested mitigation measures such as destroying the aadhaar database and arming people with biometrics laden smart cards. Many privacy fearing people have blocked their biometric authentication by locking it.

Very few people have seen it as a technology problem that can be addressed using technological measures. One such Idea that I have suggested in online forums is to make it harder for companies to correlate databases and building profiles of individuals based on the aadhaar number.
Addendum: Recent press reports suggest that UIDAI is looking at providing dummy numbers to companies to seed in their databases which will ensure uniqueness yet preserving privacy as these dummy numbers cannot be used to find the real aadhaar number.

I have found interesting avenues for research on differential privacy and how correlation of databases can be avoided.