Subbaraman Iyer
2 Jul 2014
A file photo of Aadhaar cards. (Photo by PTI)
The Union Home Ministry’s mandate to the Registrar General Of India (RGI) to prepare the National Population Register (NPR) and use that as the basis for the disbursal of the Government payments spells the death knell of the Aadhaar platform. The turf battle between the Home Ministry and the UIDAI which the former won means that the 63 crore cards issued at a cost of about Rs 4000 crores along with the complementary infrastructure, network linkages and support services would be slowly rendered useless.
Despite the reservations expressed by Standing Committee on Finance chaired by Yashwant Sinha of the BJP in 2011, governance-driven Chief Ministers in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh (BJP-ruled States) have embraced Aadhaar. Narendra Modi as Chief Minister gave Aadhaar, a mission mode status when it was launched and had 70 per cent of the population covered. Madhya Pradesh ranks third in issuing Aadhaar cards among all Indian States. Most of the States have enrolled over 50 per cent of their residents. Aadhaar is a 12-digit number provided against one’s biometric data issued after a process of reduplication ensuring the uniqueness. It has to be emphasised that Aadhaar doesn’t confer any entitlement or eligibility of benefits. Any Government body is free to define their own criteria for eligibility and then map the individual’s Aadhaar number. It thus establishes a database of eligible Aadhaars for a specific purpose with relative ease and consistency.
It is applicable to even determine citizenship and its attendant benefits. Hence the criticism that the minuscule number of non-citizens would appropriate Government benefits is clearly flawed as the necessary controls can be built to target beneficiaries.
The fact that Aadhaar has the potential to save Rs 60,000 crores in subsidy management (assuming it can save a modest 15 per cent of the national subsidy outlay of Rs 4 lakh crores) cannot be ignored.
An expert committee headed by Prof SG Dhande (former Director of IIT Kanpur) reported that DBTL (Direct Benefit Transfer for LPG) pilot in 291 districts was successful in achieving its objectives, viz reducing diversion, eliminating ghost/duplicate connections, and improving LPG availability. It recommended the DBTL to be reinstated. The savings that can be obtained in PDS (where about 10 per cent of the ration cards are duplicates) would easily exceed Rs 4000 crores!
The privacy and security concerns of Aadhaar (reasons that have been cited to jettison Aadhaar) may be legitimate but are exaggerated. Aadhaar just collects basic demographic data with biometrics and doesn’t send any personal information when used for authentication purposes. Google and Facebook are the universal gateways to online services for most users worldwide, yet no one complains because of the ease they offer. To merely see Aadhaar as an identity platform would be myopic. Aadhaar based applications can deliver cost benefits and improve service delivery. The necessary programming interfaces have already been built for several applications.
Aadhaar can easily serve as the access mechanism to an unified payment infrastructure that could centralise all financial transactions, including wages, salaries and subsidies – under a single number to an Aadhaar enabled bank account of the recipient. Agencies would be free to set their own business rules, integrate those with their business processes and automate the cash transfer process, all of it in real time. Aadhaar can be the critical enabler to integrate and consolidate subsidies and entitlements under one umbrella, ensuring better governance. Aadhaar then evolves to become the digital infrastructure to create a governance eco-system.
The NPR has been slow right from the start. Till date it has only produced only 24 crore cards with biometric data. The NPR authorities are now planning to carry a nationwide door-to-door verification exercise to establish the credentials for every citizen by validating over 15 demographic variables and five biometric fields. This is going to take many years and several additional thousands of crores. It will have to develop the programming interfaces to streamline payments, and direct benefit transfers— critical areas for managing subsidies. With NPR replacing Aadhaar, the benefits to be gained in targeting subsidies and improving governance will be delayed.
The poor will suffer the most as they have to resort to bribes to get access cards and avail Government benefits. Sadly, bureaucratic turf battles and political motives have trounced developmental aspirations.
The efficacy of the Government should be in building applications and using analytics to improve governance using existing digital infrastructure; not creating new access mechanisms with marginal benefits. A lot of tax payers money has already gone into building Aadhaar.
Implicit in the “Minimum Government, Maximum governance” promise is the aspect of speed of delivering it. By trying to reinvent the access card and using only Government agencies, this decision of the Union Home Ministry is clearly inconsistent with the promise.
(Professor Subbaraman Iyer has been in the technology deployment for close to 3 decades. He currently teaches Emerging Technologies at leading MBA schools in India and abroad.)
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