UIDAI will finish all enrolments by March 2014, says deputy director general Anil Khachi
ET Bureau May 31, 2012, 01.49PM IST
Once more unto the breach. Nandan Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority of India has told its regional offices to resume Aadhaar enrolments.
It had temporarily ceased all enrolments in January to address safety-related concerns which had been voiced by, among others, the home ministry. Close to five months down the line, Anil Khachi, a deputy director general with the UIDAI who looks after enrolments told ET that the new system is now ready for rollout. And that UIDAI will finish all enrolments by March 2014.
In a 45-minute interview, Khachi told ET about the new system, and how it is better than the earlier one. As such, the interview also sheds light on the weaknesses in the earlier system. Khachi also disagreed that the changes were made solely at the behest of the home ministry, saying: "It is not just the MHA ( Ministry of Home Affairs) which was flagging concerns. We were also seeing some areas where we needed to improve. Accordingly, these are the changes that we have made."
In all the glitches he identified, he took care to say that there were no more than one or two instances where things went wrong.
On non-state registrars
"The first was a question on whether non-state registrars like banks should continue. We decided they could but only in a controlled environment." Essentially, they are free to do enrolments in their own premises but if they want to do enrolments outside, they will have to keep the state UID Implementation Committee informed.
Without that, says Khachi, "There was no idea on who is enrolling where." Which was resulting in complaints and counter-complaints and competition between the centres. Also, he says, given that the state govt is enrolling people as well, when it knows where all the enrolment centres are, it is more comfortable as it knows what is going on. The UIDAI has also created a site, on the UIDAI site, where all non-state registrars have to indicate where their enrolment stations will be.
This portal will contain data on the location, the dates the camps will be located there, the supervisor's name and his/her contact numbers. "We have also made it mandatory that enrolment centre staff log in with GPS," says Khachi, "So we will be able to test what the centres say about where they are enrolling against this GPS data."
On enrolment kits
"We have told enrolment agencies (EAs) that their enrolment kits must mandatorily sync with the Central ID Repository every ten days," he says. This is an additional control. "If we have 25,000 machines and only 16,000 machines are sending data. this will tell us how many machines are active in the field. That will help us plan better."
The syncs will also tell UIDAI how many data packets to expect, when the last sync was, how many enrolments have been done, the software version being used, and whether the antivirus is updated.
If any machine is not doing as many enrolments as the others, says Khachi, UIDAI will be able to spot it. If there is no sync, it will be able to freeze that machine till the sync is done.
On operators
At the front end, says Khachi, "We had a system where in order to enrol, the operator needed three things -- he needed to be certified, he needed an Aadhaar number, and he needed to be activated on the system." And then, the EA would give him or her a username and a password and that was it