NEW DELHI: Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia may be okay with a little overlap between the National Population Register exercise and UIDAI's aadhar project, but an earlier note prepared by the Plan Panel had pegged the cost of this duplication at Rs 15,000 crore.
Based on the premise that increased accuracy of iris as a third biometric, as compared to the use of all ten fingerprints, was marginal, the Planning Commission, in a note dated September 30, 2011, had said that collecting iris data may not be worthwhile given the cost implications and other complexities, except for high-security purposes.
The note signed by Ahluwalia - a copy of which is with ET - argued that the exclusion of iris and convergence of NPR and UIDAI could cut the combined cost of the two projects by half. By leaving iris out of purview of the NPR/MP-NIC (multipurpose national identity card), the NPR-MPNIC cost was projected to come down to Rs 10,328 crore from Rs 13,438 crore.
And were the UID to take the data entirely from NPR and its aadhaar number superimposed on MPNIC, the technology-related costs of UIDAI would hover between Rs 4,000 crore and Rs 6,000 crore. This would be a major decrease from the projected Rs 17,864 crore expenditure on issuing unique identification numbers, complete with iris capture, for the entire 1.21-billion population of the country.
Incidentally, the Plan panel went for a subsequent rethink and after an intervention at the highest level, decided to endorse UIDAI's move to include iris as a third biometric, apart from photograph and fingerprints, in the Aadhaar card. The Registrar General of India (RGI) followed by also including iris as a biometric for NPR.
As the Cabinet Committee on UID debates the NPR-UID overlap issue on Wednesday, Ahluwalia, according to sources, is in favour of extending UIDAI's existing mandate of issuing aadhaar cards to 20 crore people to cover the entire 1.21 crore population, even if it means running UID and NPR schemes on parallel lines.
The Plan panel's September 2011 note on duplication of work in the rollout of aadhaar numbers by UIDAI and NPR-MNIC effort on part of RGI dwelt at length on whether there was any need to collect iris data. It recalled that the Cabinet Committee, while considering the progress report on UIDAI, had only given an in-principle approval, entailing the need for further discussion on the prescribed procedure.
Iris was included on the recommendation of the biometric design standards for UID applications committee, headed by DG, National Informatics Centre. However, the committee had barely asked the UID to "consider" the use of iris, "if they feel it is required for the UID project." The IT Department, on its part, pointed out that the benefits of adding iris as an additional biometric to achieve de-duplication needed to be examined with regards to its implications on cost, time, ground level feasibility and accuracy.
Though a committee of secretaries under the Cabinet Secretary instructed the department of IT, NIC and UIDAI to send their views to the Cabinet Secretariat on the iris issue, the inclusion of iris as a third biometic for UID was cleared even before these views could be communicated.
