[saravanannkl]

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Government digital services are improving, but not at the pace that people may expect. Modi scrapped the practice of getting attested documents. Now you can self attest. There are also some interesting initiatives like digilocker[1] where the government documents are issued and stored based on Aadhar number. You can use that to submit documents to third parties directly from digilocker. People have opened bank accounts using Aadhar [2] within minutes.

There are some challenges to address. You still have to deal with the bureaucracy. E.g. I went to apply Aadhar for my wife at my local municipality office. The person who was distributing the application form asked me to come after 5 hours. The reason he gave was there is some meeting going on and he can't give the form to me until the meeting was over. I had to then involve my ward councilor and the chairman(mayor) to get the form. Now official gave a different reason. People are wasting the forms, so we are not distributing it. I thought you must be kidding me. Since I knew the elected officials I got these forms. Think about people who don't know important people in that office.

There are privacy concerns about Aadhar. Government need not collect biometric information for Aadhar. They should have made Aadhar similar to US social security number instead of collecting biometrics.

[1] https://digilocker.gov.in/ [2] https://twitter.com/deepakshenoy/status/744208624545763329