Last updated on: January 31, 2013 23:50 IST
Believe it or not, Prime minister Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet is unable to arrive at consensus on the exact identity of AADHAAR -- Unique Identification Number (UID).
Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram thinks it’s “just a number”. He is correct. But Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, Railway Minister Pawan Bansal and many other ministers say, “It’s a card.”
The Union Cabinet that met on Thursday, reportedly, displayed a sensational lack of knowledge about their own ideas, plans and its execution. The question was, probably, worth Rs 5,500 crore.
When the Cabinet met on the issue of harmonising the AADHAAR and National Population Register’s exercise and the need for a Resident Identity Card, an unbelievable situation arose.
The country’s most powerful people, sitting on both sides of Dr Singh, on the high table of power, could not decide if AADHAAR is a card or merely a number and as a result they could not approve the budget needed to take the issue further.
During the debate, on the pros and cons of the resident ID card in the Cabinet, even Dr Singh was moved to ask, "Do we really need it?" So much confusion arose among the mighty men that the Union Cabinet had to send the issue to a Group of Ministers to sort it out.
It was surprising for many present to see that the cerebral political entity and even a trained lawyer such as Chidambaram didn’t know that many of his colleagues have gone through the biometrics exercise and got a card that they call the Aadhaar. He was, reportedly, taken by surprise when so many ministers told him that they had gotten “the card”.
He insisted that AADHAAR is merely a number and not an ID card, says a source privy to the event.
At one point, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh butted in to say that there was no need of a ‘card’ for the identity of a resident of India because citizens can get and store the ‘identify number’ on their mobiles.
Veerappa Moily , the man of wisdom and more, got provoked. He taunted Jairam that he (Moily) is not able to handle his own mobile phone and expects villagers to use mobile phones to show their identification number. Jairam meekly quoted the millions of mobile connections that are in use in India.
The wise men of India are confused because the brand name of the Unique Identification Number project is Aadhaar. At same time the government has initiated the creation of the National Population Register by collecting specific information from all residents in the country during the house listing and housing census phase of Census 2011 from April 2010 to September 2010, according to the NPR’s website.
NPR data comes under the Union home ministry and AADHHAR is handled by a specially created body under the Planning Commission in 2009. It is headed by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilkeni.
The turf war going on between the NPR and AADHHAR is compounding confusion at the highest level and even among a billion plus Indians.
Gopalkrishna, member of Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties, who gave testimony before the parliamentary standing committee on finance that rejected the UID Bill, says, “It’s not surprising that Cabinet ministers are confused. The Aadhaar advertisement in Imphal has shown that it is a card, although, it is not. The UID Authority of India has been misleading citizens.”
He says, "Chidambaram is right in this case. What appears as a card is deceptive because only the 12-digit number, which printed on the so-called card, is of relevance. It is this 12-digit number which is part of a central database of UID/Aadhaar that acts an identifier, and not as an identity card.