Nobody’s using CBDCs – India’s piloting one anyway

https://techmonitor.ai/policy/digital-economy/nobodys-using-cbdcs-indias-piloting-one-anyway

by TT482 • 4 years ago

51 158 4 years ago

techmonitor.ai

presentation• 4 years ago

Really wish they said what a CBDC is.

SanjayMehta• 4 years ago

Indian here - I had to read the article to find out what it was.

Then I remembered the RBI had made a ruckus about it a few months ago.

I doubt anyone cares since almost every one uses their mobile phone and UPI for money transfers.

adwn• 4 years ago

Really? It's right there in the second sentence:

From China to the UAE, the Bahamas to Nigeria, countries around the world have started trialling the use of central bank digital currencies as a way to translate their national fiat currencies into a means of digital exchange.

CBDC = Central Bank Digital Currency.

bfung• 4 years ago

It’s there in the first sentence, though def not so clear as it’s not capitalized: Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

ahiknsr• 4 years ago

CBDC = What is central bank digital currency? see https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/digital-currencies

influxmoment7• 4 years ago

One payment system to rule them all and monitor a population

1letterunixname4• 4 years ago

Does a term require more than 2 seconds of thinking? If yes, then describe it, otherwise it's unnecessary. This one seemed obvious.

adql4• 4 years ago

Of course it's obvious its Centralized Big Dick Contest /s

It's customary to expand shortcut in full if it there is chance it might be unknown to the reader and this isn't even a financial blog but a tech one.

pjkundert• 4 years ago

They will use a major crisis to force adoption.

lzaaz2• 4 years ago

Thank the Lord this wasn't ready to deploy during covid. They are going to prepare it for the next crisis.

zx8080• 4 years ago

In some places long before covid. Go to swedish coffee shop in 2018 and try buying a cup of coffee with cash. No luck. Digital payments only.

pascal_wizzard• 4 years ago

there's no need for a cbdc, just invoke the emergencies act and you can do whatever you want with anybodies money

FollowingTheDao• 4 years ago

As the popularity of physical money diminishes, however, that nexus could break down.

And if the "popularity" of physical money does not diminish, they will get rid of physical money. But physical money is still popular for people in many cases.

CBDCs need to be resisted with everything we have. They are not about convience, they are about control "on the fact that it provides another opportunity for the state to peer into private individual transactions."

India is hostile to crypto because its cannot be (as easily) controlled.

I am no fan of crypto either.

ssivark3• 4 years ago

Meh. The article expends zero effort in actually engaging with the Reserve Bank of India's motivations or the CBDC design [1], and is filled with shallow comments about the roll-out in other countries.

This is a very important topic as it has the potential to reshape banking/economics on the timescale of decades. For a good down-to-earth understanding of "layer 1" -vs- "layer 2" money, refer the following post [2]. India's digital payments ecosystem (the "UPI") has been an unparallelled success at the second layer. Beyond that, there are many motivations that make it potentially interesting to consider digital layer 1 money -- starting with the costs of managing paper money, reducing settlement risk, potentially smoothing cross-border payments, the possibility of setting negative interest rates, etc. There are definitely pros and cons, but I'm yet to find a comprehensive and well thought-out analysis (and would appreciate any links!), especially in the Indian context.

[1]: RBI Concept Note on CBDC: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/PublicationReport/Pdfs/CONC...

[2] https://brettscott.substack.com/p/casino-chip-cashless-socie...

blackoil• 4 years ago

Paper money is a small percentage of total money, and a much smaller percentage in terms of actual transactions. Most of the money is already digital.

themoonisachees• 4 years ago

Isn't that highly affected by how much money rich people (ie users of digital money) have? One whould think paper money still is used by a good 50% of the worlds poorest, but they can't hold a candle to the amount hedge funds, banks and simply normal people from western countries move around compared to them.

gokuldas011011• 4 years ago

Isn't all money still paper behind the scenes, where the banks transfer to one another

nmridul• 4 years ago

Maybe transaction wise paper money is still a small percentage.

But my understanding (correct me if wrong) is that the total money running in the country at any momemnt is never more than what is printed.

With digital money the central bank can issue it without the cost to print. As per (1) it costs around Rs 10 to Rs 17 to print Rs 100 note and have to be reprinted once they get damaged.

(1) https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/will-digital-currenc...

mitthrowaway24• 4 years ago

Paper money still has a very important role, because it can't simply be deleted from your account.

That's important, because central banks are considering negative interest rate policy, which would mean your bank account would drop by a percentage each month. This would drive people to spend or invest their money, supporting consumption and inflating asset prices.

The reason they can't do that right now is because many people would withdraw their funds and hold cash. That option needs to be removed for negative interest rate policy to be broadly implemented.

(There are a few places, like Europe, where interest rates already went negative, but only slightly and it only applied to institutions like banks).

ano-ther• 4 years ago

Here is a bit more on the international efforts for CBDCs

https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/cbdc/mcbdc_bridge.htm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33865185

potamic3• 4 years ago

Most examinations of CBDC paint a grim picture of things to come, mostly in terms of yielding absolute power to the central bank. As with any situation involving power, with good intentions you can do wonderful things, with bad intentions you can do equally horrifying things. In the Indian context, the latter is of particular concern, especially when one man can demonetise the whole country overnight on a whim.

There was a good discussion here on CBDC sometime back -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27805709

ssivark3• 4 years ago

Thanks for the link -- it is a nice discussion, and contains pointers to interesting content that I wasn't aware of. (likewise, for the sibling comment with links about mBridge)

I appreciate the privacy concerns, but for anyone reading, the tradeoffs have a completely different meaning in the Indian context.

1. A fraction of the Indian populace is so poor that the cost of operating a cash economy (printing currency, transporting it securely, stocking and operating ATMS and bank branches) might prove forbiddingly expensive to service rural areas -- leading to financial exclusion. So, for them, digital infrastructure (which reduces cost of transacting) is a matter of life support, rather than the luxury that it is in the developed world (where everyone has bank accounts, access to cheap credit, and can swipe plastic cards everywhere).

2. While demonetization might have been a horrible fiasco, India's digital payments system (UPI) has been a phenomenal success -- there is substantial evidence on the ground to support that. (The former was arguably used to drive adoption for the latter, but whatever.) The state derives substantial trust from its citizens for this and other developmental and sociopolitical factors.

3. To generalize from those two nuggets -- the Indian populace (with its distinct history and cultural context) has a different relation with the Indian state -vs- banks -vs- corporations, compared to the situation in other countries. Therefore, the factors influencing trust/distrust, the developmental needs & aspirations, the politics, etc are substantially different. It makes very little sense to try and understand Indian concerns and preferences with a perspective honed elsewhere. Eg: In a system where you might trust the state more than possibly corrupt intermediaries (for a complicated array of reasons), the trust calculus is completely inverted. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, or that nothing generalizes across countries, but the point is that the ground realities are completely different, and they influence the tradeoffs one is willing to put up with.

4. On the specific theme of privacy: the RBI concept note devotes section 7.7 to it. I wish it were more thorough, maybe it's acceptable at this preliminary stage, and can be improved through iteration... but that's an example of the kind of thoughtful commentary that would be very useful -- an analysis of specific shortcomings and/or potential improvements.

germandiago4• 4 years ago

The question should be: with the track record of wild debt countries are showing, the Twitter leaked mails shpwing political control behind and the raise in taxes, what makes you think they will do something good?

Besides that: why should I put my effort at the management of people I do not trust so that they do what they deem appropriate without paying for their mistakes? Am I his slave or something?

rhaway847733• 4 years ago

This is absolutely true. On the flip side, digital currency has also led to much more reliable disbursement of funds to the actual beneficiaries of those funds. This has been a dramatic change.

Western (and even a lot of Indian) media likes to paint a lot of Modi’s support based on his religious discrimination, but in reality that’s only a tiny fraction of the support he enjoys. Most of his support comes from the fact that, for example, even as demonetization has probably led to India’s GDP being far smaller than it would have been otherwise, many poor people are still better off because funds and services that would in the past have largely been eaten up by political and administrative intermediaries actually make it to the people.

And a large part of that is the result of some of the problematic measures like the central identification numbers and the digitization of money.

rvz3• 4 years ago

India's digital payments ecosystem (the "UPI") has been an unparallelled success at the second layer.

Hence the reason why the RBI will eventually use UPI to piloting their CBDC on top of it anyway and force all of India to use it.

That should scare us all.

rajup6• 4 years ago

That should scare us all.

Why?

jsmith45• 4 years ago

At least from a US perspective, type 1 money also has a digital component, just one only available to banks. I'm not familiar enough with how India's central bank works to know if things are similar, but the concept note makes it sound like it might be.

The accounts that members banks have at the Federal Reserve are legally equivalent to paper money. The banks can exchange part of that account balance for paper money, or exchange paper money for that account balance at any time. To settle debts between banks they almost never cart truckloads of cash between each other, but simply ask the federal reserve banks to adjust their balances accordingly.

This looks a LOT like the layer 2 money that banks create, but it is layer 1.

If RBI works similarly, then it is not really apparent why a wholesale CBDC would have substantial value. Interbank settlement would already occur via balance transfers at the central bank. It is not even remotely clear to me how an "account-based" wholesale CBDC would differ from the status quo at all. The main thing they mention is allowing more conditions to be attached to transactions allowing "programming" the central bank money (presumably in ways similar to "smart contracts"). There is no mention of why that could not simply be done by enhancing the existing systems, but they also point out that it could be a new tech stack from ground up, which suggests that they feel the existing tech stack has flaws.

Retail CBDC would be potentially more interesting, but also far more controversial. Nobody really cares about a central bank keeping a close eye on how banks send money to each other, but a retail CBDC is effectively an attempt to replace cash. There are a lot of issues with that, like people want privacy in cash transactions, but there is no way the bank wants create a new means of money laundering or similar. The fact that many plans for retail CBDCs seem to want desperately to adopt as many crypto currency technologies as possible causes lot of worry. Thinks like losing private keys meaning loss of money (and if intermediaries hold keys instead, you better hope they have really good information security.)

fab1an• 4 years ago

It's surprising to see that there are liberal proponents of this. You don't have to be a raging libertarian to see the risks of unlocking this much financial reach for governments. We (in the West) may now mostly live under reasonable governments, but there's obviously no guarantee that this won't change (including towards your <current political opponents>), and implementing social credit score systems and other dystopian things would be much easier under CBDC than it currently is?

spaceman_20203• 4 years ago

Absolutely. If it remains an alternative, it's fine. But if they try to force out physical cash completely in favor of CBDCs, you better be wary.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

I never understood this argument. It is not like governments can't tell the banks and payment processor not to accept payments or freeze all funds of certain people. Courts can already order automatic confiscation in cases like bankruptcies and so on.

eldenwrong• 4 years ago

Does it require 1 click?

potamic3• 4 years ago

Friction in a process can be an amazing deterrent and prevents you from abusing power en masse. Whenever there is a cost to doing something, it demands prudence.

lottin7• 4 years ago

Do you realise that some of the people behind CBDCs are Bitcoin developers?

influxmoment7• 4 years ago

They get money to make some software but clearly aren't proponents of a totalitarian system

lzaaz2• 4 years ago

It's not surprising. Liberals want the government to take money from people to fund itself. A digital currency allows them to do that much more efficiently.

jcadam• 4 years ago

True. I hope you like negative interest rates on your savings account.

screye• 4 years ago

Because societies function very differently in a dense & community driven country like India vs sparse nuclear nations like the US.

Once you reach a certain level of density, be that most of India or east-coast American cities, you have to rely on public services to facilitate most things in your life. The Govt. already has indirect financial veto power on you. This won't change anything the Govt. is already able to do everything that you claim CBDCs will facilitate.

Note that 90+% of India operates in a permanent survival mindset. All positives associated with libertarianism are much higher on Maslow's pyramid. These people are on the bottom rung, so the rights citizens would have to forfeit as part of CBDCs feel trivial.

Second, India is a low trust society. So, anything that increases tracking, surveillance and transparency is welcome. Trustless systems are welcome. Cash is easy (to launder) and cash is simple (to hide). The elimination of cash adds significant barriers to the most important facilitator of the low trust economy : cash.

spaceman_20203• 4 years ago

Cashless societies terrify me. So easy to control people when you can decide what and with whom they can transact with.

m4rtink2• 4 years ago

Well, with most salaries going to bank accounts it's half way there already, isn't it ?

FpUser2• 4 years ago

Well you can still take cash out and hide it under the mattress ;)

luckylion• 4 years ago

Especially since it's more common now to pay digitally and not get cash from the bank and then use it in every day shopping.

I've adopted it too when merchants strongly encouraged it during the lock downs, and it's just so easy, I've kept it. I do spend more, but I don't know if there's a causal relationship -- would handing over bank notes make me more aware of what and how much I'm buying?

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Also if you think of payment flows. I would guess that less than a dozen operators on average in each country cover nearly all of payments. And top 3-4 likely vast majority.

For Europe I believe VISA+MC, SEPA and maybe one or two domestic solutions handle most of transactions.

whywhywhywhy• 4 years ago

CDBC is way beyond that, it allows things like if someone has taken too many flights that year, bought too much sugar or alcohol that month you could make the offending purchases or all their purchases more expensive to penalize them. Or you know if they had a bad social credit score, too bad now your morning coffee costs 1.5X of the person next to you, maybe reconsider your actions.

Few reasons to implement this stuff unless that's your endgame.

spaceman_20203• 4 years ago

It's never a problem if its one of many options.

It only becomes a problem if it's mandated. If you can only get paid/pay digitally, it becomes incredibly easy to track you.

There are some people who have a legitimate, non-criminal reason to hide their work.

alkonaut5• 4 years ago

Any good implementation of a central bank digital currency should have some anonymity handling, or it's not really a good cash replacement (Unless the goal all along was monitoring, which of course will be the case in some countries). Being able to spend $500 on something without anyone knowing is important. As is not beig able to launder $5M without anyone noticing. "Tomatoes, not diamonds" is the key feature here.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

That's the kicker; I don't believe there's any government that wants anonymous digital cash. If anything, they want to be the only ones that can track it.

FpUser2• 4 years ago

It is one thing to be connected when it augments things and provides lots of benefits. But instead of adding we are moving many vital services into digital always connected realm to the point where they will not function without Internet connection. One day it will blow big time in our faces. I mean we already have warnings here and there like recent ROGERS outage disabling phone services including 911 emergency calls.

jqpabc1236• 4 years ago

So easy to control people when you can decide what and with whom they can transact with.

Surprise! Your bank and credit card company can do that now.

As being proposed in the USA, a CBDC will only affect settlement transactions between banks. Everything else will stay exactly the way it is now except transactions will be much faster with settlements taking place in real time, 24/7/365 instead of only during "bankers hours".

You'll be able to split the dinner check with a friend by putting money in his account instantly at the dinner table.

And this is all much closer than most people realize. It is in trials now and expected to go live in mid-2023.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

snapcaster3• 4 years ago

But we currently have the option to bypass those restrictions if we want. Isn't it concerning that these systems might become more or less "mandatory" at some point?

1letterunixname4• 4 years ago

The fun is when, in the US, a customer needs access to a large amount of liquidity, they may or may not receive it, depending on the nature of their bank, their credit, and their relationship with their bank... beyond whether or not they have sufficient funds or not. "Daily withdrawal limits" (not just cash).

adql4• 4 years ago

As being proposed in the USA, a CBDC will only affect settlement transactions between banks. Everything else will stay exactly the way it is now except transactions will be much faster with settlements taking place in real time, 24/7/365 instead of only during "bankers hours".

We literally have just that. It is a lie that digital money is required for that

This is just side effect of them putting new system up just for that that allows that.

There would be nothing stopping them to do that for the "old" money. Hell, there are already systems for it, a bunch of banks in my country have it... of course they want extra for it (gotta pay for itself)

SoftTalker• 4 years ago

I can hand my friend cash at the dinner table. And that's what I do. No central authority needs to be involved in things like this, nor should that be required.

kipchak5• 4 years ago

Isn't FedNow separate from CBDC proposals? Some overlap in purpose but different in function.

https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2022/cbdc-weekly-feds-...

1letterunixname4• 4 years ago

Yep. China is a prime example. If you don't have access to a handful of apps, you're effectively unable to eat or do anything else.

Elsewhere, when a business touts itself as cashless, I consider if they're discouraging armed robbery and/or hostile to the unbanked.

matkoniecz6• 4 years ago

Remind me about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

On 8 November 2016, the Government of India announced the demonetisation of all ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes
Several people were reported to have died from standing in queues for hours to exchange their demonetised banknotes.[180][181][182][183][184][185] Deaths were also attributed to lack of medical help due to refusal of demonetised banknotes by hospitals.[186][187][188]
The exchange of banknotes was stopped completely on 25 November, although the government had previously stated that the volume of exchange would be increased after that date.
The push for digital payments was one of the stated intentions of demonetisation.

So if someone missed this 17 days or has not managed to exchange their funds - then they would lost all their cash they were holding using demonetized banknotes.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

They only had 17 days? That's ridiculous; normally they would just stop printing them and have them be taken out of rotation in a natural fashion (e.g. bank deposits, but that assumes cash is eventually deposited and converted to a number in a bank account).

danuker• 4 years ago

That is how you realize the intent is to oppress senselessly, not just oppress.

matkoniecz6• 4 years ago

They only had 17 days?

Yes. Unless this Wikipedia page is horrifyingly misleading.

But this alone would ensure that I would keep all my funds into something more trustworthy. Even freaking Bitcoin starts to be a sane solution, to say nothing about dollars/euro/gold.

PeterisP3• 4 years ago

The goal of that campaign was not to change which denominations are in circulation, but rather quite explicitly to confiscate unaccounted-for wealth stored as piles of cash - that's why there were all kinds of quantity limits, and also the time limit to ensure that those who had a lot of such cash could not effectively launder most of it.

chii• 4 years ago

So if someone missed this 17 days

this sort of shit is what makes a gov't a low trust gov't.

It exacerbates the informal economy - people would not want to pay taxes to fund such a govt, because they don't see that the gov't is running with their interest in mind (despite india being a so called democracy).

It was a poorly thought-out policy.

matkoniecz6• 4 years ago

people would not want to pay taxes to fund such a govt

that reminds me about another gem:

The use of demonetised banknotes was allowed for the payment of municipal and local civic body taxes, leading to a jump in their revenue collections.

xiphias2• 4 years ago

It was a poorly thought-out policy

It was robbing people. Poorly thought out policy is an expression for people with good intentions, I just don't believe in that when it comes to the Indian government.

totalZero• 4 years ago

The BSE SENSEX and NIFTY 50 stock indices fell over 6 percent on the day after the announcement. The move reduced the country's industrial production and its GDP growth rate. It is estimated that 1.5 million jobs were lost.

Wow.

They should have gone back to the drawing board after seeing their announcement lop off a huge chunk of their equity market capitalization.

adql4• 4 years ago

For comparison, in Poland the "old" and "new" functioned for 2 years.

After 2 years it was not legal to pay with them but you could still exchange them in national bank...

...for next 14 years

It's just WTF.

manojlds• 4 years ago

Same in India for most cases when taking out old notes in circulation etc

This particular demonitisation was done as a shock move to ostensibly catch corruption, black money etc.

It was lauded and welcome when it was announced, including by yours truly.

It was quickly seen as a poor execution by most except the ardent supporters (which doesn't include me)

I am sure most in the govt would secretly agree it was a bad move.

walterbell2• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/ynouY

India’s central bank has estimated that 99 per cent of the high denomination banknotes cancelled last year were deposited or exchanged for new currency, dashing government hopes that its contentious demonetisation exercise would wipe out huge amounts of “black money" ... complex money-laundering networks sprang up in the wake of the demonetisation to help wealthy Indians deposit huge volumes of previously undeclared currency without exposing themselves to tax authorities. Such people allegedly sold the old notes, at a discount, to brokers who then dispatched low-income Indians to deposit or exchange them at banks.

rldjbpin• 4 years ago

people were jumping into conclusions about this event without knowing about this context. it was still a net negative imo, but the way the restrictions existed because of "black money" reasons.

however, if you love the freedom of holding cash the way you want, then this was definitely not a good time.

vishnugupta• 4 years ago

So if someone missed this 17 days or has not managed to exchange their funds

The first deadline of 17 days was to get rid of the demonetised notes by depositing them with banks.

The logistics of the demonetisation was a total clusterfuck. The banking infrastructure was kept in the dark so they were utterly unprepared to handle the rush. They were provided with zero information and SOPs so they were also totally clueless to handle different situations. To make matters worse the new weren't readily available. So the withdrawals were rationed. 500 and 1000 notes formed the bulk of notes in supply, something like 90% of notes in circulation. And this was at a time when digital payments weren't adopted by the masses. Most of the daily wage earners didn't even have a bank account. India is a large country with lots of remote, hard to access places. People were still clinging on to these old currency notes, as their primary savings, to discover that they were useless 2-3 years later. All of these lead to a cascading failures. Imagine removing 90% of circulating blood from a large animal. That's exactly what happened to Indian economy.

I'm sure there's like a dozen PhDs in there for humanities, economics students in there.

Here's a good (but hard to find) video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qELSFa5NtYc

The speaker has researched on this topic for decades.

rajup6• 4 years ago

What has this got to do with TFA?

matkoniecz6• 4 years ago

Both are weird and suspicious and complex financial operations done by Indian government on their citizens.

danbruc2• 4 years ago

Build the following and I will use it.

  - value pegged to some existing currency
  - unforgeable and easily verifiable, preferably offline
  - non-traceable, just like coins or banknotes without a serial number
  - usable offline and without third parties, just like handing over physical money

LearnProg17• 4 years ago

Non-traceablity defeats the purpose of a currency. Might as well trade in gold. For most transactions, physical money isn't really needed nor convenient.

danbruc2• 4 years ago

Why does non-traceablity defeat the purpose of a currency? While physical money - besides the coins - is tracable in theory, this seems to be only used to limited extend. Nowadays it would not be to hard to do automatically but it would have been impractical to do at scale a few decades back. And even today you could not obtain a trace without gaps even if you wanted to.

littleorca• 4 years ago

Yuan digital currency comes with expiry date.

https://bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/policy/digita...

shapefrog• 4 years ago

Central bank trials new database for their banking backend.

wtmt• 4 years ago

I don’t see the need for a retail CBDC in India right now. India already has a TCS (tax collected at source) for outward remittances beyond Rs 700,000 in a financial year. This is a tax that’s collected first and refunded or adjusted later. The tracking of these transactions across all authorized forex dealers is already done by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). So a CBDC isn’t going to add value here. But I think it will be made a case since CBDC for retail is a solution searching for a problem.

The CBDC being a zero interest instrument, only a scare created about lots of counterfeit paper currency could increase adoption, IMO (just like a fake bogeyman about “black money” was told when declaring more than 80% of the currency as invalid in 2016. [1]

Cash is simple. Cash is easy. Cash doesn’t need smartphones. Did you know that less than half (or half) the population in India has a smartphone? At least one major “too big to fail” bank [2] is distributing an Android app for the CBDC on its website as an APK file. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

[2] https://www.icicibank.com/personal-banking/online-services/f...

rattlesnakedave• 4 years ago

I like CBDCs, and I’m a big privacy guy generally. I really do not see them as being significantly worse than the status quo of digital payments. For every horrifying what-if mentioned there’s already an example of it in our current system (in the US, at least). If having them means I don’t have to deal with ACH again, I’m all for it.

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

India closely guards the rupee to prevent foreign exchange crises. A free CBDC challenges that regime because it lets anyone, anywhere, exchange rupees. So expect the sort of controls that would let New Delhi restrict that sort of activity, and then project that power domestically.

germandiago4• 4 years ago

This is going to be, literally, the biggest promotion for Bitcoin ever done when people start to understand the amount of control this hides behind.

It is the end of privacy and the beginning of telling you literally what you will be able to do or not with your own earnings abd for how long, if they decide it is appropriate. This is more of treating people like animals than individuals IMHO.

walterbell2• 4 years ago

https://www.medianama.com/2022/11/223-petition-against-uidai...

For 11 years now, Chaitanya has been working with retired Colonel Mathew Thomas to nullify the UIDAI’s contracts with foreign companies allowing access to Aadhaar data ... “Our major concern is: Did the citizens of India give express right to the government in the year 2010 to hand over their data to US. foreign companies? For sure, I did not give any consent,” said Chaitanya. Aadhaar data consists of citizens’ bank accounts, ration cards, addresses, mobile numbers etc.
... the High Court has advised Thomas to approach the Supreme Court again ... the Supreme Court in the Aadhaar judgment had clarified that “private entities shouldn’t have access to Aadhaar data.” The Supreme Court also said that before accessing biometric data even by the government, judicial authorisation must be a requirement.

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

I didn't give any consent to tax my income either, government still does it. Fact is that the relationship between citizen and state is not consensual in nature, at least in India. So it is futile to fight it case by case.

reactspa• 4 years ago

One of the greatest strengths that both China and India have is that the West will never understand them.

The West will think they understand them. They will assume they understand them. They will be sure they understand them. But they will never understand them.

Hence the implication in the headline (well-written headline, by the way), that if nobody else uses it, India is wasting its time.

The same people said about UPI (Modi's digital payments push):

- hardly anyone has cellphones in India

- it'll take years to train India's illiterate masses how to use an app on a phone

India now has 850 million cellphone users. And the government is creating incentives to put one in every hand.

UPI now conducts more digital payments than China or USA (I've heard that it handles more than both combined, but I don't want to make that claim without a reference, and am feeling too lazy to look for one right now).

cuteboy192• 4 years ago

The same people said about UPI (Modi's digital payments push)

It enrages me how quickly the opposition memory holed its nonsense criticism of UPI when it was first launched. And now they are doing the same thing to erupee

_448• 4 years ago

India has very successfully introduced infrastructure for mobile payments. This is one of the pieces to counter corruption and also to bring the "underground economy" into the mainstream. Digital currency is another such piece to help reduce "underhand" dealings.

CBDC in India will probably be used to curb hawala, black money and underground economy.

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

I dont think it really matters that nobody is using them

The current structure of central bank networks required governments to offer an incentive for banks to join it

In the US thats a 6% dividend every year for the past 100 years

The same tactic will work again

Nobody’s using CBDCs – India’s piloting one anyway

Related Stories