10662 - Aadhaar critical step in enabling fairer access: U.N. The Hindu

Aadhaar critical step in enabling fairer access: U.N.

PTI

UNITED NATIONS: DECEMBER 01, 2016 15:45 IST

India’s unique identification programme Aadhaar is a “critical” step in enabling fairer access to government services and has “tremendous potential” for fostering inclusion, according to a United Nations report   | Photo Credit: G.P. Sampath Kumar

World body says the unique identification programme has “tremendous potential” for fostering inclusion

India’s unique identification programme Aadhaar is a “critical” step in enabling fairer access to government services and has “tremendous potential” for fostering inclusion, according to a United Nations report.

“The decision of India in 2010 to launch the Aadhaar programme to enrol the biometric identifying data of all its 1.2 billion citizens was a critical step in enabling fairer access of the people to government benefits and services,” the 2016 Report on the World Social Situation, released by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said.

The report, released on Wednesday said, programmes such as Aadhaar have “tremendous potential to foster inclusion” by giving all people, including the poorest and most marginalised, an official identity.

Important for inclusivism

“Fair and robust systems of legal identity and birth registration are recognised in the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as an important foundation for promoting inclusive societies,” it said.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has already issued more than 108.27 crore Aadhaar numbers to the residents of India.

The report includes key new findings about persisting inequalities in education and economic opportunity and, challenges the international community to work harder to break down barriers to participation. It said global social progress, while unprecedented, has not been evenly experienced.

Lack of access to education

Some 40 per cent of the world’s population does not have access to education in a language they understand.

Children of ethnic minorities and those who are disabled are much less likely to finish their primary and secondary educations, it added.

The theme of this year’s report is ‘Leaving No One Behind — The Imperative of Inclusive Development.’ It examines key causes of social exclusion and identifies social, economic and political disadvantages that some groups face as a result.

The report concludes with concrete policy recommendations that are central to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Development based on social justice

“The Sustainable Development Goals recognise that development will only be sustainable if it is inclusive,” said Wu Hongbo, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Development, adding: “Pursuing development grounded in social justice will be fundamental to achieving a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable future for everyone.”

The report adds that in order to promote social inclusion, barriers to participation must be broken down by revising laws, policies, institutional practices, discriminatory attitudes and behaviours, and taking steps to ensure that participation is easier.

5527 - The Untold Saga of Aadhaar Nilekani at SKOCH - INCLUSION

The Untold Saga of Aadhaar   Nilekani at SKOCH

It all began way back when I mentioned to the prime minister and Montek Singh Ahluwalia about taking up some role in the government. I had natural affinity with Unique ID (UID) project as I had envisioned a common identity system in my book. When the Cabinet approved it in January 2009, I dreamt of doing this project, reminisces Nandan Nilekani

I sought an appointment with the prime minister and was due to meet him sometime in June 2009 at 1100 hrs. I met Montek and Isher over breakfast and sought their opinion. Both said, go for it. I was emboldened by this and when I met the PM, I told him that I want to do this project. He warmly agreed to my proposition and picked up the phone and spoke to Montek requesting him to close this before he leaves for St Petersburg. 

Within ten days I was appointed Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) followed by a Cabinet decision. I took time to complete my obligations with Infosys and joined in July 2009 – it all happened quite quickly. 

I ran a public limited company listed in India and in the US, for many years, working on targets, forecasts, earnings per share, revenue growth and every quarter you stand up in front of hundreds of analysts from around the world and explain how you did your business. I had come from this kind of a background. What I liked about this project was that you could really quantify your success simply by computing how many people got their identity number. It was almost like zero one situation. So the first meeting of the Prime Minister’s Committee on UID took place on 12th August, wherein we were to set a goal of number of identities to be given in next five years. We had done our homework and my team had come up with a number of 400 million just couple of days before the meeting. I said, this is one third of our population and appears too small given that we have five years, so lets make it 600 million. When, in the meeting I committed 600 million by March 2014, I had no clue how to get there. It’s a happy situation that by the end of February 2014 we were at 59.1 million and exceeded our target by the end of March. 

It is about setting a clear goal and then getting there. I think the value of the stretch goals is that it sharpens the mind, it focuses everybody’s energy and if you just keep relentlessly act on it, it can get done. My team believed in me and worked relentlessly towards hitting the bull’s eye. 

There were more than 100,000 employees at Infosys when I left. When I joined government, which is a giant size monolithic organisation, I started off by doing a startup inside government. It was a crazy idea but it worked. It was decided that we will be eclectic while choosing people as the project is so humongous that we will require the best and talented people to make it a success. Ram Sewak Sharma who is the current Chief Secretary of Jharkhand was my first partner in this project. He came in as the Mission Director. We had a cup of coffee at the Maurya Sheraton, New Delhi and he asked, do you want to sign up? I said, sure. He said, if you can take the risk, I could too. He signed up in less than 10-seconds. Later, I realised that it was kind of self-selection going on and several others from bureaucracy were ready to take the risk without UIDAI having any office space, no clear budgets and an unforeseen future. 

I believe they all came because they wanted to do something different by still being inside the government system. I am very fortunate that I attracted and inducted risk-taking bureaucrats into the organisation. We went around and picked up people from different services and also from private sector to have multi-talented team. 

It is not merely a technology project. But it is about technology of giving a unique number to every Indian resident is among the most complex things you can do because it requires you to match everybody’s biometrics to everybody else’s biometrics to make sure that there is no duplicate. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem today - we have a database 600 million people and one million people enrolling. We have to do 600 trillion comparisons to eliminate duplicates. So, it is a massive computational task. What was more important than technology was to build consensus around the project and this took us 14 months. While my crack team worked on the nitty-gritties of technology and policy, I travelled to each and every state capital and met with the Chief Minister and the Chief Secretary of that state to get their personal commitment for the Aadhaar project. And when UID roll-out actually happened there were no surprises. 

This came from my background because as an entrepreneur who ran a business for a long enough, I realised that you go to your customers not vice versa. This went to the extent that if I had to meet a chief minister in Delhi, I would make it a point to meet him in his Bhavan and not make him come to my office. By doing this I was signaling to them that I care about you and I am coming to you because I want your help in doing something nationally important. Today, we have a rare situation where this project is implemented across the board, across all states whether they are ruled by the Congress like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka or Maharashtra or whether they are ruled by BJP like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Goa or CPM in Tripura.

I am convinced that even in politics if one has a sufficiently important transformative idea and one invests in building the relationships and convinces others about the value of the idea to all the protagonists, one can get a lot done. We repeated the same with financial system. We went to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Indian Banks’ Association (IBA), bank chairmen, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and other regulators and all ministries. So everybody was on-board before we got into real business. 

We did what we set out to do – 60 crore UIDs and recently the Cabinet has given UIDAI the extension to do Aadhaar enrollment in four states of UP, Bihar, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh. That population alone is about 330 million. Now we are on target to get about 950 million by 2015. We have built a backend system that can generate 300 million UIDs per year. At this pace we will touch a billion by 2016. 

There are four distinct uses for the Aadhaar platform. The first is clearly uniqueness – which is hugely beneficial for government because government can use this to eliminate ghosts and duplicates in the beneficiary list that it has. The government spends upwards of 3 trillion rupees a year on entitlements, subsidies, MGNREGA wages, LPG and kerosene subsidies and so on. Estimates of leakage vary from 10 to 40 per cent. Even if there is 10 per cent improvement in productivity of the spending, it would mean 300 billion rupees in a year. The entire Aadhaar project lifecycle cost is estimated at 150 billion rupees that can save minimum 300 billion rupees per year. 

Secondly, we already have about 60 million bank accounts linked to Aadhaar numbers into which you can directly credit money. What is important is that ultimately all bank accounts will be Aadhaar linked, it is only a matter of time. Not only, customers can transfer money using Aadhaar numbers, the government entitlements like subsidies or pensions will be transferred as direct benefit transfers. 

It could also be a corporate entitlement. Recently for example, the Trident group from Chandigarh has started using it to pay all wages using Aadhaar bridge or it could be a person to person, a migrant from Odisha working in Delhi can send money to his wife, using her Aadhaar number she will get it in her village. The good news is that since the entire process is transparent and traceable you get exactly what you deposit. 

Thirdly, what electronic know your customer (eKYC) does is that it allows a person to open an account without any piece of paper – Aadhaar number is sufficient. The backend authenticates the number and releases the KYC details to the bank, which then opens the bank account after its acceptance by the RBI. Similarly, one can purchase a life cover of house insurance or even a pension policy. The backend takes care of everything. This is dramatic, as it has suddenly created an expansion of inclusion by getting everybody into the financial system. 

The last thing that it does is online authentication, which allows you to verify your identity anywhere. For example, if I want to withdraw money from a micro-ATM in a village, the Aadhaar does the authentication. 

I urge you to keep this in mind especially people who write about Aadhaar’s premature demise that it is really going to go a long way from here. We are trying to create an ecosystem. An ecosystem where the government creates something and the private sector ultimately uses it for innovation to deliver better. It is not always about technologies, but yes, it does play an important role of an enabler.

Nandan Nilekani was until recently Chairman, UIDAI

2542 - Shubhashis Gangopadhyay: The real meaning of inclusion - Business Standard

Shubhashis Gangopadhyay: The real meaning of inclusion

It's a word that everyone uses, even though its definition is fuzzy
 Shubhashis Gangopadhyay / Apr 28, 2012, 00:01 IST


It is always great to talk to teenagers. The other day I was speaking to two of them who are in their first year of college — articulate, ambitious and not afraid to ask difficult questions. The first thing one notices among this age group is that they know how to push a discussion forward. They never stop you when you are yet to complete what you have started saying and, most importantly, they think about what you have said before they speak. In particular, and this may be because they are just about starting to find their feet as adult Indians, they seldom assume that you must be wrong if they do not understand what you have said.

Our discussion was about inclusion in education. And they started with the following question. There are millions of students finishing school who sit for the Indian Institute of Technology exams, but only a few thousands get in since there are only that many seats in these institutions. These are expected to be the very best, and people know it. The fact that a very small proportion of those who try actually get admitted makes IIT-ians end up being a small and exclusive group. Would inclusion mean that more IITs are created, more seats are generated, and a greater number of students get into these institutions? And, if that happens, and the IIT entrance tests are truly discerning, more seats would mean that we will have to go down the talent ladder, and students with lesser and lesser ability will become IIT-ians. This will dilute the average quality of an IIT-ian, reduce their average pay and, hence, the rush to enter an IIT. They did not stop there but went on to say that, indeed, can this not be said for all levels of education?

Obviously, I was immediately tempted to say that everyone entering an IIT is not “inclusion”. But, before I said that, I started thinking how to define “inclusion”. If inclusion is a concept worth striving for, it is worth defining it in the first place.

To ensure that it is indeed a worthwhile thing to achieve, we must be able to distinguish between what is inclusion and what is not. If everything we want to do is “inclusion”, it is a trivial concept; if we cannot figure out what it is we must do, it is a vacuous concept.

Given that all our leaders and all multi-lateral aid agencies and everyone who wants to make a statement are talking about inclusion, it is a great idea to try and understand what it is and what it is not.

In India, financial inclusion is a common term. We have operationalised it into that of opening a bank account for every adult. Unfortunately, when some of us went to some villages to help the villagers open bank accounts, they were totally unexcited about it. We explained the advantages of opening the account – saving their extra cash and withdrawing from it whenever they wanted to – but they were not impressed. At first we thought it was a lack of “financial literacy”, another buzzword doing the rounds in academic, civil society and policy circles. It was only later that we realised the reason was much simpler. Going to the bank for any purpose was difficult, if not impossible, for these villagers. The bank was a frightful place, and they were treated with disdain by its officers. At least, that was their perception. They were more at ease doing other things with their money than saving it in bank accounts. Oh! They would love to have access to something like bank accounts — but not in the institutions we wanted them to open in. The bank to them was exclusively for others, people who were not like them.
So, if having bank accounts is not financial inclusion, what is? We are back to the original question: what is inclusion? Let us try another oft-repeated objective: inclusive growth. Many suggest that our post-reform experience is not one of inclusive growth. I am yet to understand what exactly this means. Does it mean that everyone’s earnings must increase at the same rate? Or, these rates could be different as long as they are all positive? Should the poor first become non-poor and then others can grow?

The students’ question brought back all these confusions that I have long had and tried to cover up so that I was not excluded from the group of people who knew what inclusion is and, hence, talked about it a lot. I did not want the teenaged students to include me in their group — those who do not know what inclusion in education meant.

So, I racked my brains and came up with the following answer. Inclusive education does not mean that everyone must enter, or pass out from, an IIT. It only means that if you wanted to, you could have a shot at it. The child labourer is excluded because she can never dream of entering an IIT; she may absolutely hate IIT, but not trying to join an IIT should be her decision. Even if there is only one IIT train, every child must have access to the platform where the train comes. Of course, not everyone will get on to the train but everyone knows what to do to have a shot at the train. This is called inclusion in education. Everyone must go to school till class 12; those who work hard, and are willing to work harder still, will join an IIT. Others will, by choice, decide not to work that hard and become economists.

2009 - Inclusion | Letter from the Editor

Sameer Kochhar
Editor-in-Chief, Inclusion

You may recall our advertisement in the last issue of Inclusion that essentially said that a large number of Indians are poor and the reason given for that by the policy makers is that they do not have a bank account, Aadhaar number, Internet, computer etc. (if they do not have bread, why don’t they eat cake?). Meant as a satirical commentary on policy responses to poverty, it is even surprising to find recommendations like creating cloud computing for the poor or giving them tablets as minuted recommendations in Department of Information Technology’s first meeting on e-Inclusion. An example of the distance between Bharat and India if there ever was.

I was recently invited by SEWA to address their annual general meeting and took the opportunity to experience their work firsthand in a couple of villages. Barely literate salt pan workers were discussing branding and business strategy. With a one million rupees capital, their turnover was 45 million rupees last year and they had just negotiated a 1 billion-rupee loan from a bank. They have been training the daughters of the workers on data-entry, who in turn have found employment with the village Panchayats. Cannot think of a better response to poverty and exclusion. This issue of inclusion carries many such stories of empowerment from SEWA.

Other than the good work being done under Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), micro-insurance seems to be a disaster area, with neither the Ministry of Finance nor the regulator pushing the insurance companies. If one simply Googles “IRDA and financial inclusion/micro-insurance,” one would be hard-pressed to get any results. Absolutely the reverse is true if one Googles “RBI and financial inclusion.” Little wonder, Life Insurance Corporation does not even consider insurance for the poor as a key result area. Commitment to micro-insurance should be a key deciding factor while appointing the new chairman of LIC.

Our last issue on Aadhaar sparked off many a debate within the government and other stakeholder communities. It also helped put all the unanswered issues on the front-page of mainline media. At long last, Aadhaar is going through the acid test! Unfortunately, the debate is still being hijacked by issues of administrative control and autonomy rather than on how quickly we can provide an identity to the bottom 600 million Indians. Just exactly why we need to photograph them, fingerprint them, iris scan them for proving poverty and their need for government subsidies, that too seem to be getting capped at 32 rupees a day as definition of poverty, which now seemingly is undergoing correction.

The fallout of the 2G and CWG episodes is taking its toll with quite a few departments deciding to roll-back reforms and handling projects with no/little involvement of the private sector. Spending worth billions of rupees is being planned on mega-projects for many of which the government clearly lacks the skill sets or capacity. A senior technocrat cited the “Golden rule – he who controls the gold (government) decides the rule.” Repercussions of this statement in a democracy can be pretty dangerous. Other government departments have become pretty stringent with levying penalties and revoking bank guarantees etc. Are we throwing the baby out with the bath water? lWhen I met Nandan Nilekani six months or so after  he took over as chief of UIDAI, his question to me was that with him joining the government, what has changed? I said, the general public has a lot of expectations from him - from poverty alleviation to education, he seems to be holding answers to all problems that have plagued India since independence. And my biggest challenge? he asked. Delivering on those expectations was my answer.

Two years down the line, this has turned true. Aadhaar is today expected and ‘loosely’ positioned to be the sole panacea that will transform governance, make Bharat part of the growth process, plug leakages and slippages into welfare schemes and bring about prosperity all around. What is essentially an identity number has been over-romanticized as an ‘enabler’ to put India on a fast-track growth path by virtue of becoming a pivot around which all anti-poverty measures will rotate and also deliver. While Nandan's contention is  that he has not promised any such thing, the fact is that he has also never denied the frenzied media reports on UID as a fix all solution. There seems to be a demand generating industry at work for UID and the UID enabled.

It is feared that UID is attempting to impose technology to foster centralisation rather than promote de-centralisation and coming up with magical remedies in technology for problems that perhaps have solutions only in governance reform and institutional regeneration. Sometimes, technology can even be used as a quick bypass to constitutional provisions. Panchayati Raj Institutions being deprived of their right to 'identify' its people as the main UID registrars is a case in point. Focus is instead on 'identifying the already identified' who open bank accounts or have ration cards or even PAN cards. Arguments for conditional fund transfers instead of unconditional fund transfers and technology duplication efforts like the Aadhar enabled RuPay card to do exactly what all cards do anyway are some of the cases in point.

The Planning Commission has started the consultations for 12th Plan and has formed several committees consisting of experts. One such committee on formulating the department of IT plan has over 60 members and no visible representation from civil society or consumer groups - coherence of discussions notwithstanding. Yet other sub-groups are being formed ministry wise to look at their need for ICT rather than having an overall perspective on an underlay of ICT for the 12th Plan that can result in a virtual silo-busting within the government schemes and can actually make this plan different from the earlier ones and hopefully ranking it higher on delivery and inclusive growth.

There is also little clarity as to how the government will integrate the UID with the National Population Registrar (NPR). Considering the multifarious agencies and the issues involved in the work of capturing biometrics and digitizing the demographic information it certainly is a gigantic task. Is does not seem to have happened at least in Tembhli where the information captured by private enrolment agency for the card is not quite at par with the details earlier collected by the census enumerators.

To end on a lighter note, a close associate of mine who hails from Kumaon hills was recently given an Aadhaar card. His biometrics, photo and other details were captured at the time of application. The person who delivered the card demanded a photo identity to match the photo on the Aadhaar card and handed over the card on seeing his PAN Card ! So much for biometric technology.