Wednesday, April 18, 2012
New Delhi: There are still far too many people who have no acknowledgement of existence by the State, said Mr Nandan M Nilekani, Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). He was speaking at the session on Inclusive Growth and Industry at the CII Annual General Meeting and National Conference 2012, held at New Delhi on April 18, 2012. He said that the Unique Identification (UID) programme was being driven by two factors – first is the increasingly large amount of welfare spending and the second is the people's need for an identity recognized by the State. He elaborated that entitlements and subsidies total up to almost Rs 300,000 crore, and it becomes imperative that the benefit reaches the target audience.
Earlier, in his opening remarks, Mr Hari Bhartia, Past President of CII and Co-chairman and Founder of Jubilant Bhartia Group said that in the last 5-7 years, a lot of effort has been made to invest in and put resources in the social sector as the emphasis on inclusive growth grows across government and industry. The challenge, he said, is to ensure that the benefit reaches the targeted audience, as it is generally believed that there is a leakage of almost 40-50%.
With increasing urbanization, and as more people move from the agriculture sector to other sectors, inclusive growth assumes far greater importance, he said.
The UID programme, said Mr Nilekani, can help achieve inclusive growth. "This is an open ID platform on which further applications can be built by different providers – FMCG sector, Banks, Healthcare providers – to service their beneficiaries," explained Mr Nilekani.
The UID gives a person a single national ID, mobility and authentication which can be used across the spectrum to access services. Its online nature makes the UID a very powerful tool – since the number is on a cloud, it can be verified immediately anywhere in the country. An important characteristic of the UID is its portability across locations.
Speaking about how it could be used for financial inclusion, he said the ID (the Aadhar number) can be used to deliver banking services to a vast majority of people who have not had access to the services. The Aadhar number can be used to open a bank account; it acts as a financial address for people, and its online authentication feature allows one to access funds at the point of service through a micro-ATM with Business Correspondents. He said that this is being rolled out and currently a pilot project is underway in 4 districts of Jharkhand.
In the area of inclusion in the workforce, he elaborated, the UID can be used to create a skills repository on a cloud, which can be easily accessed.
Industry and Government, he said could partner to create inclusion very effectively using the UID. "It is up to industry to build applications on this platform – that's the way we should think of these partnerships."
The aim is to give everyone a UID – our goal is to give 200 million people an Adhar number this year and also enroll another 400 million, and we have started work on that. We hope to have enrolled more than 50% of the people by 2014, he said.
