I hope you mean this in jest as this privilege does not apply to vast swathes of the population.
Maybe you get a free-pass as a baby/child/orphan. But as an adult, you don't get to just "appear" onto the electronic grid of citizen presence. If there were such a mechanism and it were easy and devoid of "loops" then illegal immigrants would have exploited it by now to become citizens.
You may think you're a citizen, but you are not unless you have the blessing of your government.
My understanding was that this was the previous system. Government run warehouses with quotas, and shops that handed it out. You had to present a ration cards, as there has to be some system to stop you collecting 10 times a day & running a shop. (This would otherwise be more profitable than many people's jobs.)
And it didn't work. I forget, but maybe 80% of the wheat went missing? (Officially "eaten by rats" but really sold by officials on the side.) And this food subsidy was quite a large part of the national budget. So that's the scale of the problem which this hoped to solve. If every citizen has a number and a bank account, and you just wire them the money, then you won't lose 80%.
The American debate about ID laws is just a much smaller issue. Surely some people cheat, but the current system basically works.
Tell that to the undocumented immigrants. You forget that you have a birth certificate to prove you are a citizen.
1. using the introducer system (The enrollment center operator would gladly do this for you)
2. signing a checkbox that says they've lived in India for 180 days.
1. http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/illegal-bangla...
2. http://www.tribuneindia.com/mobi/news/jammu-kashmir/communit...
3. https://m.indiatimes.com/news/india/here-is-why-you-should-n...
My point being, the other guy is arguing that USA doesn't require identity documents, which is laughable. You need SSN just to earn money in USA.
Are they, really? It's not like the government is buying people cars. They're handing out food to starving children. If people are hungry, give them food. Don't make them jump through hoops for it.
Perhaps my problem is that I see it as an American. Americans are citizens of their country whether they can prove it or not. Whether they can pass an ID scan or not. It's one of the reasons why voter ID proposals are so vocally opposed. I am a citizen, just as I am a human being. I do not need to prove it to exist. I didn't even have a Social Security number until I was an adult and wanted to start work. It wasn't until the tax authorities made SSN's mandatory to deduct dependents from your taxes that people started registering their babies at birth.
However, in some other nations, people don't think of themselves as citizens unless they have the blessing of their government in the form of a document or a registration number.
Americans look at the Soviet Union, and other failed states and worry about what happens when a particular group of people falls out of favor and can be disenfranchised with the click of a button.