Union Home Minister Amit Shah is the news today for making a big-bang proposal. The BJP leader opined that India needs a multipurpose identity card for its 1.3 billion citizens. This card will ideally amalgamate the functions currently performed by passport, Aadhaar, driving licence and bank accounts.

A news agency today quoted Shah as saying this: "Why can’t we have just one card for all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, bank account, driving licence, voter card? There should be a system that all data should be put together in a single card."

The idea sounds quite radical. The government has spent thousands of crores on the Aadhar project. Will the card become irrelevant if and when the new identity card comes into existence? The project for the new card might take many more thousands of crores actually.