A billion identities at risk as India goes cashless

NEW DELHI (Feb 27): Shivam Shankar Singh woke last month to an e-mail from an Indian government department. It had a name, address, mobile phone number and bank account with a code for money transfers and investments made in a dairy farm. None of the details were his.

The e-mail contained details submitted to a program that collects personal and biometric data, and was meant for someone from the eastern state of Bihar. Singh, a polling campaign manager for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in Manipur, a state further east, rang the phone number listed on the e-mail but it didn’t work.

“That shook me,” said Singh, who posted about the incident on Twitter. The e-mail did not request information or ask him to click a link, suggesting it was not a phishing bid, so he did not report it to the police.

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