New Delhi, July 11: A proposal to lure poor Indians into the unique ID card net with a Rs 100 bait has set off the latest battle between babudom and the Nandan Nilekani-headed Unique Identification Authority of India.
The expenditure finance committee (EFC) of the finance ministry has nixed the proposal and sanctioned only about half the money the ID authority had sought.
The authority had asked for Rs 6,700 crore for Phase I of its project Aadhar, which aims to provide 12-digit unique ID numbers to 60 crore Indians over the next four years. It got Rs 3,500 crore. The authority is scheduled to roll out the first set of unique IDs from August to February.
Government sources, however, suggested that the differences were not just about money. They said India’s top bureaucrats were uncomfortable with “outsiders” — Nilekani is a technocrat from the private sector — entering the government and usurping what they saw as their fief.
It was the 13th Finance Commission’s idea, mooted in its report submitted in February, that people should be attracted to the ID project with the offer of Rs 100 to all below-poverty-line applicants.
The aim was partly to disarm conservative Indians who might have objected to officials collecting their biometric data such as facial characteristics, fingerprints and photos of the iris, especially in case of rural women.
The EFC has asked the ID authority to come back for additional funds only after it has met its target of issuing unique numbers to 10 crore people within the next 18 months. Although the EFC wants the proposal for the Rs 100 incentive scrapped, sources said a final decision was yet to be taken.
The EFC thinks people will be spurred to apply for the unique ID when they realise the number is a pre-requisite to gain benefits under the rural job guarantee scheme and the public distribution system.
The babus and the ID authority have, however, been locked in a tug-of-war for sometime. Many bureaucrats have balked at the idea of working for the Nilekani-headed authority at a time private-sector executives and Harvard scholars have queued to join up. The result is that the authority is still short of IAS officers to man key posts a year after its inception.
Repeated requests from the department of personnel and training to state chief secretaries to send IAS officers on assignment to the ID authority have brought little result.
Earlier, some bureaucrats had opposed Nilekani’s plan to include the iris scan, citing the need for costly equipment, and had relented only after a senior cabinet minister intervened.