Will a new national ID actually fix any of India’s problems?
Can tech-based solutions, like a new national identity card system, really fix India’s poverty challenges? 3728
India’s national identity card project has received a lot of favorable media attention internationally. This is largely due to the involvement of Nandan Nilekani, the former CEO of Infosys, the Indian IT company.
The goal of the effort he heads up is to issue an identity card to each of its over 1.2 billion residents. The card contains a unique 12-digit number that is linked to each person’s fingerprint and iris scans.
I have personally gone through the scanning and documentation process of both aadhaar and the national population register. I was disappointed by the sloppy manner in which they were conducted and was also confused about why I had to go through the same sloppy process twice.
When it was done, I was also shocked to see my aadhaar card, because it failed to meet the hype generated. It was just information printed on thick paper, which will crumple unless I get it laminated with plastic.
Outshone by Pakistan?
As if that weren’t bad enough, given all the media hype, what ought to really shock any fellow Indians is that neighboring Pakistan’s identity card looks smart — just like an ATM card printed on plastic. That is, of course, not how it is supposed to be. Whatever India’s problems, we are supposed to have the upper hand over Pakistan at least technologically.
That our long-time nemesis, Pakistan, would outdo us is almost unimaginable — and certainly comes as a surprise to all international observers.
It’s reality, though, and a tantalizing illustration of how long the road will be before we really have a “shining India.”
In India, the ID card project was launched with much fanfare in February 2009 and a year later the identity card was called aadhaar.
The meaning of the Hindi noun aadhaar is “basis.” The choice of a new Hindi word that conveys the emotion of “hope” was politically wise. It implied that the card is the basis of something that will be offered in the future– and that aadhaar will one day become adhikar meaning a “right.”
The majority of India’s population still lives in rural areas and does not speak English. Calling it an “identity card” would only have made it yet another card like the voter identity card, which proves citizenship. In contrast, the aadhaar card only indicates residency in India.
Last year I saw poor pilgrims from India wanting to travel to Nepal being turned down at the New Delhi airport because they only had the aadhaar card for proof of identity as opposed to voter identity cards or passports.
A card against the bureaucrats?
Western media decided that the ID card project was a testament to India’s information technology skills and showered praise on India’s technology gurus. They were expected to bypass India’s infamous bureaucracy and shepherd India successfully through one of the “most technologically and logistically complex” identity card projects in the world.
Rajiv Gandhi, India’s former Prime Minister, is often quoted as having said that out of each rupee allocated as welfare aid to the poor by the government, only 15% actually reaches them. The rest “leaks” into the administrative system — as payment to the bureaucracy that manages such schemes or as a bribe to the middlemen entrenched in the system.
Once aadhaar is in place, the hope was, and is, that all aid — whether in the form of food, fuel or fertilizer — would be delivered as direct cash transfers to the intended beneficiary.
Eventually, aadhaar is even expected to resolve India’s longstanding problems in basic education and health systems. The card could help check attendance of students and teachers in rural schools as well as the presence of doctors in rural health centers. It is also intended to serve as the basis for building a complete health information system.
Democratization of banking?
In addition, the ID card is said to be sufficient for opening a bank account. Thus, it should improve entrepreneurial activity through expanded access to banks and offering bank loans.
Currently, over 50% of India’s people currently do not have bank accounts. And 90% of the bank accounts that had been initiated about a decade ago under a policy of opening bank accounts for all Indians are now either closed or unused.
For all this tantalizing array of hoped-for or intended benefits and effects, one has to wonder. Could the mere entitlement to a number resolve most of India’s persistent development problems — as the government claims it will?
Will welfare benefits really arrive in the pockets of the deprived masses — rather than allow the benefits to leak away through the entrenched bureaucracy?
Can the scheme, if executed successfully, bring India’s 60-year long development effort to a happy end? In other words, is “technology” India’s new political invention for mediating social problems, a kind of yellow brick road to prosperity?
Redundant system?
Outside of India, few people realize that the country already has in place a system of assigning economic identity cards. That card helps, for instance, to classify a family as falling under the “poverty line.” These “below poverty line cards” (BPL cards) are issued to specific families in order to ensure access to monthly food and fuel rations.
Under this system, a designated distributor supplies wheat, rice and other essential food items, along with kerosene that is used as fuel for cooking, at a steep discount over market prices to people who are certified as living below the poverty line.
However, as is so often the case, no well-intentioned scheme comes without severe problems: Counterfeit BPL cards can be secured easily from a town or village official for a “price.” That means that genuine BPL families are often denied their rations.
The huge price arbitrage between subsidized and market priced food and fuel also creates an incentive for the distributor to divert subsidized items into the regular market. In addition, BPL cardholders are too poor and politically too weak even as a group (read: disorganized) to question the unavailability of supplies.
Despite these leakages and drawbacks, the BPL rations still provide a lifeline for many households and are often the only thing that stands between them and starvation.
A voluntary identifier
Many of India’s leading social scientists and development economists have expressed concern over the scale and scope of the aadhaar scheme. In particular, they have questioned its ability to replace the BPL scheme.
A crucial point in that regard is that the identity card system (or aadhaar) is voluntary as of now. In practice, that means that many people, whether or not they are below or above the poverty line, may not have an aadhaar card.
The government’s attempts to pass the National Identification Authority of India bill in the Parliament failed in 2010. Among the reasons for failure of passage were concerns over the project’s high cost, possible compromises on privacy as well as duplication of the work of the National Population Register of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Without the legislation, the Unique Identification Authority of India is only an executive body under India’s Planning Commission.
The bill itself would not make aadhaar mandatory, but would keep it voluntary. It would not prevent any service provider from requiring aadhaar in order for eligible people to receive services. As if this weren’t complicated enough, there is an ongoing turf battle with the National Population Register, which is also collecting photographs, fingerprints and scans of all residents.
No new data generated
The card on its own does not capture any of the information that is needed to decide where a person is located with regard to the poverty line. This means that the system needs to extract this information from other, older databases of the government (such as the BPL database), even though it is probably outdated by now.
Therefore, the replacement of a BPL card with a unique number is not likely to be as straightforward as it is made out to be. The logic of converting food and fuel aid into cash aid is also in doubt.
That means that the mills of Indian politics and the bureaucracy are once again turning in a manner that create lots of steam and pseudo-action, but little effect.
Part II
All of the grinding bureaucratic wrangling over a new ID card for India matters a great deal, because amid growing prospects for some, many Indians are still desperately poor. The least that can be done to help them is to disintermediate corruption and the theft of benefits intended for them by “virtue” of a rapacious bureaucracy.
Take the issue of food rations. These are mostly procured by women and shared with family members. The rations are paid out in kind because cash could be easily misappropriated for non-essential purposes, such as the consumption of alcohol by “irresponsible” members of the family.
Despite all the current activities, the idea that the identity card will finally manage to “identify” the poor in India is a strange argument to make in a country where the majority are poor.
Why not just find the rich?
As pointed out by Dr. Kirit Parikh, a former member of India’s planning commission, all India needed to do was to eliminate the “easily identifiable” rich minority and extend welfare benefits to everybody else.
The “easily identifiable” rich make up less than 30% of the population. Better yet, they already carry identity numbers — in their passports, bank accounts and tax payment accounts.
The website of India’s aadhaar project reassuringly answers the question “why aadhaar?” by stating that it is “every resident’s entitlement to ‘the’ number’” (exact words). What the government intended to say is not clear, but the entitlement to a number is not the same as the entitlement to basic necessities of life.
Even the claim that “all one needs to bring with oneself to prove one’s identity are one’s eyes and hands” is questionable. aadhaar cannot establish a person’s identity, economic or otherwise.
National security motive
What it can do is merely validate the claim that the person is who he says he is. Was this the ulterior motive of the project?
To answer that crucial question, a quick trip into history is in order. The idea of issuing national identity cards is traced back to the national democratic alliance (NDA) headed by the BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP). It so happened that it was in power during India’s brief conflict with Pakistan in 1999.
This unexpected military conflict is said to have initiated the decision on issuing mandatory multi-purpose national identity cards for reasons of national security.
India’s present governing coalition, called the united progressive alliance (UPA) under the leadership of the Congress Party, is seen to be presenting the same idea, but in a better light in order to gain political and social acceptance.
After all, nobody can oppose ID cards at the national level if the project is presented as a means to distribute welfare benefits to the poor!
It is ironic that the idea of a national identity card for all Indians originated after a conflict with Pakistan. If the BJP or the Congress Party leaders had just taken the trouble to look across the border into Pakistan carefully, even if only to spy, instead of summoning India’s information technology gurus, they would have made an amazing discovery.
Pakistan beat India to the punch
Pakistan’s four-decade-old national identity card scheme was originally conceived as a surveillance and security tool, but now serves as a means of distributing welfare aid.
Pakistan implemented a national scheme of identity cards way back in 1975, also for reasons of national security. But when the scheme was rolled out, a national identity card with an 11-digit unique number was issued to over 95% of the population.
The first three digits in the number were linked to the district (province) where the person was born and the next two digits signified the year of birth. The last six digits linked the person’s identity to that of his family.
In 2000, all old identity card holders in Pakistan were asked to renew their cards, which captured historic information in the form of bar codes. In 2010, the bar-coded cards were replaced with cards with a magnetic chip of 10-year validity.
Apart from historic details such as place of birth and family history that were captured in the early rounds of the scheme, the latest identity cards of Pakistan are linked to the person’s driver’s license, bank accounts and so on.
Beyond national security
The “security” underpinnings of Pakistan’s identity card cannot be denied. A person without the card cannot enter a government building and the card is required for applying for jobs or passports.
However, the card is also linked to welfare programs such as Benazir Income Support Program. Through this program, over 3.8 million under-privileged families can purchase wheat, rice, sugar and cooking oil worth 1,000 Pakistani rupees in the desired proportion every month from 600 utility stores across the country.
While this card is linked to the national identity card, it is sensibly issued only to the female head of the family to avoid any leakage of the intended aid.
Regional governments formulate their own schemes and distribute welfare benefits to families targeted through the national identity card database.
Emergency management
During emergencies such as floods, temporary cards are issued to people in areas affected by the floods with 180-day validity. This card has been used to distribute food, blankets and fodder for animals within 24 hours of a natural calamity even in the most remote and difficult to access areas.
According to a senior official from Pakistan’s disaster management agency, flood relief was dispatched to victims in remote areas almost instantaneously during the 2010 and 2011 floods through the national identity card that was linked to cash dispensing machines.
For all these impressive successes, which ironically give Pakistan the upper hand over India technologically and administratively, one thing is for sure: While welfare benefits are being targeted and transferred efficiently through the national identity card in Pakistan, it has barely scratched the surface of Pakistan’s persistent development and social problems.
Technology is no silver bullet
That underscores the harsh reality that neither the well-executed plan providing entitlement to an identity card nor the delivery of welfare benefits transferred on the basis of the card has necessarily entitled millions in Pakistan to a better life.
The takeaway for India is probably that complex social, political and governance problems cannot be reduced to simple technical problems.
The focus on a number delivered by technology will not only provide the government a cover to hide its inefficiency, but also shift the blame for poverty onto the poor. India’s unique identity number is not the solution for dealing with poverty. Only ending poverty is!
No comments:
Post a Comment