This Paper will raise more questions than give answers, and that is the whole purpose of penning down this paper - to generate discussion. I believe I have some credentials to pen down this paper, as my Team in DIT, Maharashtra has got Maharashtra to be #1 in the country in UID enrolment, with more than 9 crore enrolments, and has set up the most impressive UID eco-system. Our UID SRDH(State Resident Data Hub) is also fully aligned to Census 2011 locations database, which nobody else in the country has done. Earlier, during my stint with Election Commission of India from 2004-2007, we got 70 crore voter list on Central Servers in 15 Indian Languages, did massive effort to get them into Unicode, and linked them with 50 crore photographs (20 crore digital and 30 crore scanned from old laminated sheets), to produce PHOTO ROLLS. At that time, Hon’ble President Abdul Kalam was talking of Digital National Population Register, and in ECI, we were excited to practically have this digital National population Register of 18+ Age Group, with Names, addresses and Photographs.
In border areas, there is concept of "D voter" (Doubtful Voter - whose citizenship is in doubt). The Delimitation of Parliament and Assembly Constituencies based on 2001 census, and done during the period 2003-2007, was totally on Census of India village and city ward boundaries. Election Commission, Delimitation Commission and Registrar General of India worked closely to produce most scientific, totally GIS based delimitation exercise, the biggest in the World. Having hands on experience with World’s biggest voter database, biggest citizen photo database, biggest delimitation exercise and biggest biometric database has been a wonderful experience. I believe the time has come to now merge all of these into one seamless database. UNIQUE IDENTIFICATION NUMBER vs CITIZENSHIP EVERY individual present in the country, whether an Indian Citizen, or an immigrant (whether legal or illegal) or a Visitor (with proper Visa, whether staying here within visa period or overstaying a bit) needs to be identified properly and uniquely. The UID never positioned itself as citizenship card. In that sense, having broader coverage than just the citizens has its benefits. Getting biometrics of immigrants and Visitors can actually help the Security Agencies. But the ground reality remains that getting hold of UID can enable some illegal immigrants to get other papers like Ration Card and Voter Card etc., which are meant only for Indian citizens. The other benefits like Bank accounts, driving license need not be deeply linked to citizenship issue. Hence there is a need to have a clear-cut action plan to delink UID number from citizenship issue, and to ensure that UID card/number is not used to get benefits which are available only to citizens. For availing such benefits, NPR number linked to Citizenship rather than UID number should be used.
ENROLMENT PROCESS, UID vs NPR
The market driven, multiple Registrar approach of UID has shown very clear results, reaching 60 crore enrolments in 3 years. Election Commission has taken two decades to reach this number of EPIC cards, and Census of India has also done smaller numbers compared to this. Census of India approach to give enrolment machines through BEL and ECIL etc. has also been appreciated by enrolment agencies, reducing their costs and risks in biometric enrolment. In last two years, the biometric enrolments by NPR also have been as fast as UID enrolments. In UID enrolment, about half the enrolments are obliquely supervised by District Collector or Field Government machinery, while half are totally by Banks or Oil Agencies etc. Whether in UID or NPR, ultimately the agencies like BEL, ECIL, Banks, LPG companies are just one part of the chain, and exercise really little control over quality of enrolment. In both the projects, there have been multiple levels of outsourcing. The operator actually enrolling people in the field has no clue about this whole chain of agencies involved. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is the way the Information Technology sector works- multiple levels of outsourcing. I believe that more than Government supervision of enrolment, it is better documentation of the database structures, lots of validation checks, both at client and server levels etc. which can lead to better quality of enrolment.......See More
