The ambitious and controversial Unique ID scheme — Aadhaar — received a double boost in this year's budget: not only did Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee sanction Rs. 1,758 crore to enrol 40 crore more residents, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also emphasised that the scheme would soon become the main channel through which people could access a wide variety of budget benefits.
“I propose to allocate adequate funds to complete another 40 crore [beyond the existing 20 crore] enrolments starting from April 1, 2012,” said Mr. Mukherjee in his budget speech. “The Aadhaar platform is now ready to support the payments of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act; old age, widow and disability pensions; and scholarships directly to the beneficiary accounts in selected areas.”
He outlined the pilot projects that have already started using Aadhaar to validate PDS ration cards and reduce leakage in LPG and kerosene subsidies through direct transfers. He claimed that substantial economies in subsidy outgo could be achieved through the Unique ID scheme.
Part of the Rs. 1,758 crore that has been sanctioned will be used to help scale up these pilot schemes and roll out Aadhaar-enabled payments in at least 50 districts within six months. A computerised PDS network to implement the Food Security Bill will also rely on Aadhaar.
In an interview to Doordarshan soon after the budget was presented, the Prime Minister drew a vision of a future budget, which would depend on Aadhaar to deliver most of its goodies.
Asked if Aadhaar — despite controversies over privacy, security and legitimacy — would be “the main platform on which the budget is to distribute benefits to the people of India,” Dr. Singh replied: “I think the Finance Minister has made that quite clear… There may be controversies, and there are controversies in this sort of thing all over the world. But we have, I think, begun well and we will use the modern technological devices to cut out wastage and leakages in the delivery mechanism for various public-sector services.”
The ringing endorsement is significant, given that barely months ago the Unique Identification Authority of India and its chairman Nandan Nilekani were under fire from all sides. The Home Ministry had raised security concerns regarding Aadhaar's enrolment techniques in what was widely perceived to be a turf war due to overlaps with its National Population Register. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance had rejected the Bill meant to give the Aadhaar project a legal backing, slamming its high costs, lack of privacy safeguards and lack of clear purpose. Privacy activists are still crying foul, claiming that the budget's sanction of fresh funds is a slap in the face of Parliament.
Keywords: Aadhaar, UIDAI, Union Budget 2012
@Naresh - I don't understand why you think your comment ought to be published but Aravind's shouldn't be. Should every opinion that you don't agree with be censored out? I think for you Freedom of Expression is the right people have to say the thing that you want them to say - but not anything else. Aravind's concerns about privacy and security problems inherent in the Aadhar project are valid. So also his concerns about the error rate in the identification with Aadhar. I work in the field of IT security and let me tell you that biometrics has severe problems - one being that it is relatively easy to get both false positives as well as false negatives.. both retinal scans as well as fingerprints are easily compromised. Please do a search on the web - there is a lot of information on the web on this. And once your identity is stolen, you cannot change either your retina or your fingerprints. Also, there is a lot of possibility for misuse of data for clamping down on people.
I'm disgusted to see this kind of comment from Mr.Arvind getting
published. Is he aware the backbone infrastructure of Aadhar or the
people who are doing it? It is unfortunate that in our country we
cannot identify who our citizens are...They are trying to correct the
mistake they have committed over years...Aadhar will see that all
middleman(may be affected party like Arvind) will get eliminated and
the subsidy goods reach right people. One word of caution is that
government should not take the mask of aadhar and escape the
governance. They need to use it deligently.
Aadhar is part of the insidious militarization of India concurrent to the imposition of 'austerity' on the masses under the garb of the 'growth' mantra centric to the neo-liberal economic thinking of both the major parties. Though UIDAI itself has announced a conveniently rounded down 2% failure in authentication testing, this will become the default mode of feeding fiat paper to the hungry. As the food-stamp distributing agencies of the USA make over 2 billion dollars, it is quite clear who the main beneficiaries of the project will be. The technical foundations are unproven in ensuring critical authentication, immunity from systemic fraud and data proliferation/theft. It is a subtler and less effective mode of control over a population that the Nazis used in simply 'branding' inferior peoples. MMS and his cohorts must be seen as the puppets of the globalists. Hopeful that better sense will prevail soon and limit waste of precious capital.
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