Multiplication of Effort
Surabhi Agarwal
Among the poster boys of the Indian IT industry, Infosys Technologies co-founder Nandan Nilekani is certainly no stranger to outsourcing.
Small wonder then that when he was given the mandate to spearhead the ambitious unique identify (UID) project last year, he decided to keep just the strategic decision making part with the authority and decided to outsource almost every key element of the project – be it data collection or data hosting.
The idea is simple – let the experts do what they know best, which would save not just government resources but also make the process efficient and fast. Moreover, instead of starting the database building process from scratch, he decided to partner with programmes such as MGNREGA and Census, which already have or are enrolling a significant portion of Indians on their lists.
Also in the offing are tie-ups with the PDS system, tapping passport and income tax data along with banks and insurance companies. Impressive as it may sound, the idea is not bereft of its challenges.
Take for example the collection of biometric data of almost 120 crore Indians. Biometrics involves taking impression a person’s fingers, iris scan and photograph – according to the standards set by the UID. However, as the Centre is in the process of digitizing its many government to citizen services like driving license, PDS, passports etc, there are several projects underway which are collecting biometrics of citizens – most with different standards in terms what biometrics they capture – leading to a major overlap.
Consider this: The Census and the National Population Register (NPR) which will be formed as part of the latest Census exercise is one of the biggest partners of the UID project. Besides the basic demographic details, the NPR will collect biometrics too. Nilekani recently clarified that UID will act as a back-end of NPR, where the latter will collect the data and UID will process it.
However, if that is the case, then why has UID floated a tender of its own for collection of biometrics considering that both the projects target the entire population of India. Meanwhile, there are other schemes which are also experimenting with the use of biometrics in order to digitize the process.
Another tech firm, HCL has recently been awarded a project to provide smart cards to below the poverty line (BPL) families in Chandigarh with biometric information. (But how many BPL families would actually be in Chandigarh – which is India’s richest city in terms of per capita income? Well, that’s another story). And there are more such examples. The point here is not just duplication of effort, but wastage of tax-payers money.
A single biometric machine costs Rs 2.5 lakh. If each and every government department starts to procure its own set of devices, one can estimate how much it would cost the government exchequer. As an example, the NPR has recently been allocated over Rs 3,500 crore for just digitising the data base.
Moreover, the total manufacturing capacity in the world for such devices is only around 10,000 per month currently.
And here we haven’t even talked about the wastage of time of citizens. Imagine being knocked on your door every month, and asked to submit your biometrics for some service or the other or being called to some government office because they now need the impression of your all ten fingers instead of just the thumb, which was the case earlier.
Maybe, like in the case of NPR and the UID, where common biometric standards have been put in place, other government to citizens e-initiatives could tap into the common biometric database.
Meanwhile, Nilekani and his army of thinking men could start with putting in place a list of such agencies that are already on to the biometric bandwagon.