Written for an Online Debate competetion.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) headed by Nandan Nilekani, was established aiming not only national security but also with an objective to help the poor to access the benefits of various government schemes with greater ease. If implemented properly this is undoubtedly going to be a revolutionary step that can have huge benefits and impact on public services and also on making the poor more inclusive in what is happening in India today.
But the question is the feasibility of implementation of this project which has a guess estimate of 1.5 lakh crore (according to Frontline magazine), in a developing country like India, where one fourth of the population live below poverty line and over 80 percentage of the population live under Rs.20 a day (Arjun Sen Gupta Committee report). There is no doubt that the unique identification number could play some role in targeting benefits better at people who deserve it, but in India the prime need is education, health and sanitation (40% of the children in India are chronically malnutritioned and 700 million Indians do not have proper sanitation facilities). When such a situation persists, surely this money could be better used.
London School of Ecnomics (LSE) did a study for the implementation of a similar project in Britain and concluded that the technology envisioned for this program is highly untested and unreliable and that similar projects when implemented even in small scales have encountered serious technological and operational problems and this is defenitely going to get amplified when implemented in national level. So there is no guarantee that the system is secure or that it cannot be hacked or misused.
The concept of UID came up with an anti-terror agenda , but there is need to safeguard against potential harassment of undocumented individuals, especially poor migrants and there is no provision for this in the scheme. And regarding its potential benefits in public service schemes, the service delivery in rural communities is hampered less by the inability of resident to prove identity (population size is small; everyone knows each other) than by defalcation and corruption. Two of the biggest government outlays for social security are NREGA and PDS. In NREGA, there are two avenues for misappropriation are labour (fake names, over/understated days worked) and material (overstated amounts, fake bills). UID will not address the latter and will address the former only if the worker physically clocked in/out using automated biometric readers, and if money could be taken out of bank accounts only after positive biometric proof. The simplest fingerprint readers cost $50 (Rs. 2000) and it’s financially unviable to put one in each of the 600,000 villages in India (or even ~300,000 Panchayats). Again these finger-print readers are not totally fool-proof.
Likewise in PDS, eliminating defalcation using UID will require positive biometric proof before grain disbursement otherwise what is to stop the FPO from making fake entries, or not opening the ration shop etc? In addition, the problem in targeted welfare schemes is of eligibility and not of identity. The varying numbers of BPL families in the country is not a problem of inability to identify the uniqueness of an individual but of his/her eligibility based on different criteria such as income, nutrition (calories), other wellness indicators.
Again enrollment into the UID scheme is not mandatory, but demand-driven. So if an organization mandates UID before providing their services then, the burden of enrollment will be on the organization as opposed to the beneficiary. Lastly, the estimated cost of each card is Rs. 20-25, which should not be taken from the outlays of social security schemes without clear explanation of consequent benefit in service delivery.
The developed countries like US, UK etc, as they couldn't respond to public concerns about misuse, have effectively put aside the consideration of similar schemes for those countries. Now if developed countries cannot tackle the problem of misuse, then how can India, where not even the issue of Election ID cards without misspelling the name and adress cannot be gauranteed claim that this huge scheme can be implemented without flaws effectively?
