Nandan Nilekani virtually wrote himself a new job when he wrote Imagining India. On pages 367-371, he went into the business of issuing a unique identity card to all citizens—a project that has now been handed over to him, to general approval about a great choice having been made. With a full measure of realism about what he is getting into, Mr Nilekani terms the project a “hairy” business; and in his book (excerpted on the facing page), he gives some idea why. Among other things, he quotes an unnamed academic as saying that the number of BPL (Below the Poverty Line) cards circulating in Karnataka exceeds the total population of the state, let alone the BPL population. The labour ministry in New Delhi will endorse that: when it began issuing cards for health insurance in the national capital, it found that more than half the BPL cards in the city were bogus. Even otherwise, it is easy to see how difficult the business can be, when you have to weed out illegal Bangladeshi immigrants from among genuine citizens.
The two standard arguments in favour of such a card (and there are more in Imagining India) are national security/immigration, and preventing fraud when it comes to government benefit programmes. The arguments become stronger when many kinds of cards are being issued in any case (there are 65 million kisan credit cards in existence, and 97 million BPL cards—though there are only 58 million BPL families), so it makes sense to have a common card with multiple uses, and a common database. But the objectives are served only if the card-issuing process is foolproof, whereas many people’s experience with something as simple as the election card is less than satisfactory.
In many democracies, there is significant opposition to the idea of such a card, because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. That is in part because ID systems were often adopted first by authoritarian governments. The countries of Western Europe have since built in many safeguards and this will be one of the issues to be resolved in India; outside of Europe, there are few significant countries that have such a card system. The US is by law prevented from issuing a national ID card, Australia gave up the idea after adopting it, as did some Asian countries, and China has now begun to go down this path—but has given up the idea of incorporating biometric systems.
To understand the risks, look at Britain, which decided in 2005 to issue all citizens a unique ID card. Four years later, the first cards to ordinary citizens are yet to be issued, and this will not be done for another couple of years. With all of some 50 million citizens to be covered, the cost is forbidding, and said to be over five billion pounds (Rs 40,000 crore). So the government has reduced the amount of data to be stored; out go iris scans, for instance. To add to the uncertainty, the Tories threaten to kill the project if they come to power.
India has one clear advantage, in that its tech companies can probably work out a card-issuing system that is truly low-cost. But there will be a trade-off between cost and utility; the more data you store on the card, the greater its usefulness, and the higher also its cost. The bigger challenge is likely to be the organisational one; with an imperfect administration, and the extent of illegal immigration from Bangladesh, not to mention the open border with Nepal, the issue of cards that assume citizenship can cause operational nightmares. In short, Mr Nilekani should not expect a smooth ride.
