MUMBAI - A key parliamentary body has all
but hurled out India's high-profile national
Unique Identification Project, perhaps the most
hurried, if not largest of its kind in human
history.
After a two-year life, the
biometric identification scheme for 1.2 billion
people faces either redesign or death. Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh heads a cabinet meeting
this week to decide its destiny.
Called
"Aadhaar" - meaning "foundation" or "support" -
India budgeted US$603 million to give a 12-digit
number to each of 600 million residents by March
14, 2014, in the first two phases. It could be big
money and effort down the drain.
The
central government had asked Unique Identification Authority
of India (UIDAI) project
chairman Nandan Nilekani to enroll 200 million
people by January 2012, in a first phase. With the
target set to be reached by January end, the
project goes effectively into a coma if the
government does not give the go-ahead.
The
UID number, set to only prove identity, not
citizenship [1], would be supported by biometric
devices such as facial recognition systems, eye
and fingerprint scanners. But the Parliament
Standing Committee on Finance delivered the near
knockout punch to the mega mission, with its
December 13 report sharply questioning its
practicability and credibility.
The
Finance Committee, one of 17 such workhorse
entities for legislative homework, also challenged
the legality, quality of technology and potential
misuse of the UID information collected over the
past two years. The project had "no clarity of
purpose," observed the 48-page report from 53
parliamentarians, "and it is being implemented in
a directionless way with a lot of confusion". [2]
The confusion is not surprising, given
that India already has one too many national ID
cards, unlike the multiple-purpose single devices
seen in other countries - the nine-digit Social
Security number in the US, for instance, China's
18-digit Resident Identity Card, or the Hong Kong
Identity Card.
In contrast, India has the
Voters ID card issued by the Election Commission,
the Permanent Account Number (PAN) card issued by
the Ministry of Finance, the passport issued by
the Ministry of External Affairs, the driving
license issued by Regional Transport Offices
(RTOs) - any one of which serves as the mandatory
photo ID proof for uses like opening a new bank
account, a cellular phone service and entering
airports. And there is also the ration card issued
by state governments to any Indian family needing
subsidized basic groceries.
But apart from
the PAN card for income tax payers, none of these
national ID devices are compulsory. Now the UID
increases chances of various ministries not just
re-inventing the wheel, but studiously reinventing
the reinvented wheel.
Adding to any
overlap, India has another ongoing mega project in
the Ministry of Information Technology's National
Population Register (NPR). This mammoth exercise
to build a database of Indian citizens includes a
listing of residential houses in the country. The
UID project was to later merge with the NPR. But
differences of opinion have arisen whether that
will happen.
Singh's cabinet meeting this
week will decide whether to resolve such issues or
dissolve the UID. Or perhaps invent a peculiar
Ministry for National Identity Cards to avoid turf
wars breaking out. Another tacitly understood
reason for the UID was fool-proof identity
verification. Yet the "Aadhaar" number apparently
has also been doled out to illegal residents, many
of whom sneak in through India's eastern borders.
The Home Ministry has strongly expressed its
security concerns about the UID.
Such
concerns are as ancient as Rome, the earliest
known country with a concrete citizenship process.
Male citizens had to register in the census once
every five years, and declare details of family
members, wealth and slaves. To free a slave he
owned, he could register the slave in the census
as a citizen, a procedure called "manumissio
censu". The census gave a sense of national
identity, and became a foundation of the Roman
Empire.
The Roman census was compulsory.
If a citizen failed to sign up, Rome was entitled
to confiscate his possessions and sell him as a
slave. Roman citizenship perks included the right
to vote, and not to be tortured or crucified for
any crime.
More modern national identity
rights though serve more benign reasons. Ashwini
Kumar, the Minister of State for Planning and
Science and Technology, told parliament that a key
objective of the UID was to ensure the
economically weaker sections are not get excluded
from access to governmental welfare schemes for
want of identity documents.
"Aadhaar aims
to provide a soft identity infrastructure which
can be used to re-engineer public services so that
these lead to equitable, efficient and better
delivery of services," Kumar said on March 10,
2011.
For this aim, the UID project seems
to have modeled itself on the 75-year old US
Social Security Services number that entitles
United States governmental aid, including for the
homeless, disabled and health care for people over
age 64. But as a two-year old project, the UID may
have attempted too much too soon for too many.
The US Social Security System, for
instance, reached out to 53,236 Americans in 1937.
By 2008, 50.8 million American residents benefited
from US$615.3 billion of governmental welfare
programs. It took a journey of over seven decades
before now, when one in seven Americans now
benefits from the Social Security number. In
contrast, the UID project aims to give 600 million
people their national ID numbers in four years.
The result is tokenism in welfare rather
than substance. In November 2010, for instance, 27
homeless street dwellers in New Delhi like Khaiver
Hussain and Tufail Ahmed received their UID cards.
Their new ID numbers helped them open bank savings
accounts and access old-age pensions. But India
has millions of urban homeless, and there is no
focused plan to reach out to them. In Mumbai,
where over one million live on the streets, the
UID has opened a facility for online registering.
The Internet and cyber cafes are not exactly
favored mode of communication among pavement
dwellers in India.
Besides the homeless,
the UID project aims to enroll the aged, migrants,
leprosy patients and other disadvantaged sections
through an "introducer system" - where the
vouching "introducer" could be a responsible
citizen, from a parliamentarian to the postman.
The postman could have been a bigger
fulcrum of the project. The US Social Security
Administration used post offices as starting point
for registration forms when it started in 1936. It
now operates from 1,400 office and US embassies
worldwide. India's 150,000-plus post offices - the
largest postal network in the world - were not
used for distributing UID applications. Where
these 20,000 enrollment stations exist has not
been made advertised either.
Instead of
manageable morsels, the UID project may have
bitten off more than it can chew - and the
government may have to spit the whole mouthful
out.
Doing some good is of course better
than doing no good at all, but the UID could have
done with a trial run in a state like Maharashtra,
or a mega city like Mumbai. Glitches could have
been ironed out, before gradually widening its
scope on a national scale - glitches like finger
prints not showing clearly in the calloused hands
of laborers, a section of population the UID is
targeting.
The cabinet meeting this week
would decide whether the world's largest biometric
ID project would solve such problems, or end up
creating new ones. The parliamentary report is
anyway a severe indictment on the governmental
habit of launching grandiose schemes without
adequate homework - particularly of the kind to
see if it would be wiser to strengthen and
fine-tune existing solutions.
Notes 1. "The Unique
Identification (UID) number called 'Aadhaar' is a
12-digit random number. It does not contain any
intelligence. The number will prove only identity
and not citizenship," Ashwini Kumar, India's
Minister of State for Planning, Parliamentary
Affairs and Science and Technology told the Rajya
Sabha (the indirectly elected Upper House of
parliament) in response to a question on the UIDAI
project. "No demographic or biometric information
will be shared in response to requests for
authentication of identity. A set of mandatory,
conditional and optional demographic data such as
name, date of birth, gender, name of parents,
residential address and biometric features such as
photograph, all 10 finger prints and iris images
will together establish and verify the identity of
a resident." 2. Standing Committee on Finance
Report
on the National Identification Authority of India
Bill, 2010.
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