The Second UPA Government has taken a momentous decision – to issue Unique Identification Card to each citizen of the Country.
That the government means business is manifestly evident from two factors: first, it has drafted Nandan Nilekani of Infosys to head this gargantuan and mind boggling project and secondly it has set a time frame of three years to complete the project and operatiionalize the same. That is a good augury.
Citizens’ Identification Card is nothing new. It is vogue in couple of countries. It was introduced and abandoned in a few because of intractable difficulties they were encountered in its operation. In the US it is banned by law.
What is the card about? What are the benefits? What are the challenges and pitfalls? What will be the cost? What will be the cost-benefit ratio? Is it worth it? Or will we be breaking a new path and showing to the world that we can do what the rest of the world cannot do? In other words, what is in store for India – for its audacious attempt to plough almost a lonely furrow on the most slippery path, history has ever known?
Unique Identification Card, is a multi purpose card issued to every bona fide citizen by the duly authorized government authority. It will have photo identity, name, address proof and biometric authentication. This card is a “single point card” “with multifarious features” and will help to identify even economic status of its citizens like people living below the poverty line or farm coolies, or marginal farmers, urban poor, indigent women, destitute children, socially and economically oppressed and deprived people. It will also indicate the professionals, highly placed people, business men, self employed people, workers of different walks of life. In fact it will identify every citizen and place them in proper and well defined and classified groups. No citizen will be left out.
The Card will serve several objectives: In the first place, this will help the authorities to identify criminal intruders who infiltrate into and ex-filtrate from the country with impunity. Concomitantly the authorities can identify terrorists, saboteurs, extremists of all hues, isolate them and emasculate them. This will help to enhance the national security for which no price can be too great.
The card will help to check perennial influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Their number is massive and their incursions constitute in a way “demographic aggression” against us.
The Card addresses not only National Security issues, but will help the government of the day to tackle several Social Security problems as well.
It is a matter of common knowledge that several social security initiatives including subsidies meant for people below the poverty line seldom reach out the target audience in adequate measure. Rough estimates with the government indicate that less than 30% reach the intended beneficiaries. Pilferages, maladministration, corruption, wrong canalizations etc result in wrong people cornering bulk of such government aids and subsidies. It is because of these basic weaknesses in the supply chain available, our developmental works are not making the impact they are expected to do. It is government hope – and this hope is not a misplaced one – will plug all the loopholes in the system, especially our PDS and similar initiatives, and ensure the poorest of the poor stand to be benefited substantially. If this hope gets fructified, peoples’ faith in the governmental initiatives will get enhanced and which in turn reinforce people’s faith in the democratic process. No price can be too high if it happens.
At the same time, experts tend to point out the single point ID card for a vast populace – the world’s second large population – spread across length and breadth of the country is fraught with almost insurmountable difficulty. The sheer number of our population should cause a scare. The linguistic diversity, cultural multiplicity, pronounced divide on account of economic, social, religious, ethnic and educational factors, should compound the situation. The geographical barriers, inaccessible terrains etc are factors to be countenanced. Illiteracy and problems relating to it need to be faced.
Fear is also expressed that a single card, with multiple features, will help the enemy agents to hack the whole socio-economic and political edifice by hacking a single card- a la- thieves break open the weakest link in the chain to grab the entire chain. In other words, even as it helps the government in its multifarious tasks, it will also help our detractors and enemies to penetrate into our system.
Technical experts are worried on another score. How authentic the biometric authentication. Eye balls and thumbs are used for biometric authentication. Scanning of eyeballs, though on the face of it, is innocuous; it can damage the eye sight. This can lead to litigation against the move by any ordinary citizen and the process can be halted. Thumbs, expert say, will vary from childhood to youth and then between youth and middle age and from middle age to old age. How do we solve these problems? In that case the uniqueness of identification loses its central point.
Certain degree of R&D efforts is therefore called for to make the project viable and vibrant.
Population-size is not all that insurmountable. Our public distribution system, despite its inadequacies, functions well. This is despite the fact that we need to cover all the people, all the regions, all the strata of the society. If PDS can function, why it is difficult to issue the UIC? The effort to understand that is going on….
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