18 DEC, 2011, 01.17AM IST, AVINASH CELESTINE,ET BUREAU
By any standards, it was a remarkable hatchet job. The Yashwant Sinha-chaired parliamentary standing committee on finance described the National Identification Authority of India Bill 'unacceptable' in its present form. The committee asked how the Nandan Nilekani-led UID project had been collecting personal information from millions of people without taking the permission of parliament.
While the NIA Bill would have given the UID project legal sanctity, the problem, the committee, said was why the government allowed UID to operate for almost three years without seeking legal cover. In the meantime it had built up a huge database of names, addresses, fingerprints and iris scans.
There were other problems. Illegal immigrants too could get Aadhar cards issued by the UID project, helping them avail of social sector schemes and putting them on an eventual path to citizenship. The report raised technical concerns about the use of biometrics, the safety of data collected, as well as the privacy implications.
Other government ministries too were unenthusiastic about UID, notably the home ministry, which is compiling its own database of citizens under the national population register project, and the finance ministry. And even the Planning Commission, UIDs parent, stuck the knife in, telling MPs that the project had gone well beyond its original mandate. ET on Sunday emailed Nilekani for this story but he did not respond.
PEAS IN A POD
Critical though it was, the report sprung one big surprise towards the end - in the very last para in fact. After saying the bill was unacceptable in its present form, the committee went on to say: "The data already collected by the UIDAI may be transferred to the National Population Register (NPR), if the government so chooses." This was ironic, since NPR and UID have much in common.
The NPR came about after the Kargil War, when the Cabinet under the BJP-led government decided to register all citizens and non-citizens resident in the country, and issue them separate identity cards. Legal backing to the NPR project was in place by 2004, through amendments to the Citizenship Act, as well as new rules which specified an entire institutional setup under which the data was to be collected and compiled.