India Jan 30, 2012
The compromise on the collection of biometric information of citizens has only helped to expose the flaws in the two parallel programs run by the Government at great public expense.
Apparently, the Prime Minister sat down both Home Minister P Chidambaram and Nandan Nilekani, the chief of the Unique Identification Authority of India, and forced a solution. Though both can claim victory, the fact is that neither has reason to be satisfied fully.
For, when the UID or Aadhar project was first initiated with great fanfare in early 2009 it was argued that every Indian would be registered and given a 12- digit registration number carrying his personal details. The data would help various agencies of the central and State government to monitor the implementation of various entitlement schemes so that leakages could become a thing of the past.
Even in early 2009 questions were raised about the enormous expense of the nation- wide exercise.
Moreover, the duplication of the same project by the Union Home Ministry which would undertake to prepare the National Population Registrar containing all details about individual citizens was considered a waste of public funds. Besides, there were genuine concerns about civil liberties and the possible breach of privacy of citizens by an overreaching State. Information collected for a nation- wide biometric database could well be misused by an authoritarian State to harass and bully citizens, it was pointed out.
Unfortunately, all these concerns were pushed into the background in the public euphoria created by the fact that the top honcho of the countrys most successful IT company had volunteered to shepherd the UID project.
Nilekanis decision was undoubtedly admirable but even he could not have anticipated the many roadblocks entrenched interests would create in his implementing of the UID project.
Indeed, he did not seem to have foreseen the deviousness of the political and bureaucratic class when he first undertook to switch from the private to the public sector. After experiencing the usual hassles of acquiring a proper office and personal staff and a sanctioned budget for putting in place the manpower structure for the ambitious exercise, when the process of data collection finally began, it was Chidambaram who now raised the red flag. The Home Minister claimed proprietary right on such an exercise under the National Population Register.
Frankly, it was a turf war between the Home Ministry and the Planning Commission which was executing the UID project. Expectedly, the stalemate resulted in Nilekanis project being stalled. Even the adequacy of funds for UID became problematic.
On the face of it, it stands to reason that there should be no duplication in the collection of biometric data. It would be a waste of money and efforts.
But all these questions should have been thought through at the time of setting up the Aadhar project, not when it was well underway. Nearly ten percent of the population had already been covered by the UID process when the work was stalled thanks to Chidambarams opposition.
Surprisingly, even a parliamentary standing committee panned the UID scheme for not doing proper spadework before its launch. It also raised concerns about national security, lack of coordination between governmental agencies, worthiness of data and technology employed to prepare a national database of all citizens.
In other words, the Nilekani project to enumerate every citizen and to give him a 12- digit ID card was in jeopardy. Last week, the PM is said to have negotiated a compromise. This allows the UID scheme to be extended further to another large section of the population, though there was no clarity whether eventually it would cover the entire population.
Home Ministrys National Population Register, however, would contain comprehensive date of all bona fide citizens. The fact that NPR has been on the anvil for a long time without making much headway ought to have been reason enough to replace it with UID. But a weak PM did not have the gumption to annoy the Home Minister. So both projects would run simultaneously. Since it had become a matter of prestige for Chidambaram, there was hope that NPR would now begin to be implemented in right earnest. Meanwhile, there ought to be no confusion about the multifaceted uses of the UID project in targeting subsidies, opening bank accounts, weeding out illegal migrants from Bangladesh and elsewhere and even tracking down terror suspects.
