Could a semi-Orwellian program to collect biometric data for 1.3 billion Indians become a key tool to pulling people out of extreme poverty and integrating them into the global economy? The world's largest democracy is betting that it will, and that it could offer important benefits in poorer countries around the world.
In this case, Big Brother has a name. It is Nandan Nilekani, Indian technology entrepreneur and now chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India — an agency collecting fingerprints and iris scans of all Indians and assigning them a unique identification number in a massive database in the cloud.
This is not, Nilekani says, a scary example of government intrusion.