Thursday, October 8, 2009

neikeni -national IDS ?

_Reproduced from yahoo-courtesy Yahoo



Jaithirth Rao

Tue, Oct 6 10:43 AM

When Nandan Nilekani was invited to take up a government assignment, there was considerable scepticism in many quarters, and justifiably so. Our government has what is known as the "reverse-Midas touch", the ability to convert gold into lead.

Think of so many government initiatives in the history of free India. Do you remember the Community Development Project of the fifties? After five decades and the appointment of thousands of BDOs (block development officers), how many parts of rural India have indeed "developed" (whatever that may mean)?

Do you remember Garibi Hatao, the magic slogan some forty years ago? At last count India had the maximum number of "garibs" in the world. So will the same fate await the Unique ID Project good intentions, tall talk and abysmal delivery leading to cynicism all around? This is a legitimate fear and our track record as a country does not lead to much optimism.

And yet, the other day as a couple of dozen of us came away from a meeting with Nandan's team, we were looking at each other, nodding our heads and saying with a mixture of awe, admiration, hope and tautened expectation something along the following lines: "Their plans are intriguing modest at one level and therefore eminently do-able, simply breathtaking in its audacity at another level and therefore absolutely desirable from the country's point of view."

The new Agency is not planning to issue a card as most of us have been thinking. In one utterly brilliant stroke, they have redefined the purpose and the outcome of their endeavour. Each Indian resident is going to be eligible for a single Unique ID Number, not a card. This means that others who issue cards, be it in the state sector (the Election Commission, the passport office, the NREGA authority, the Income Tax Department, etc) or in the private sector (banks, cell phone operators, etc) have nothing to fear and therefore no incentive to resist or sabotage the new approach.

On the contrary, they are free (as and when they choose no compulsion) to leverage the fact that there will be a unique number associated with a unique individual a symmetric relationship which cannot be violated or subverted as it will be based on non-replicable biometrics. Leveraging this facility can only help various card-issuers and if they choose not to make use of the unique IDs they are no worse off than they are today.

The fear many of us had that players, both in the public and private sectors, who have agendas of their own (including the need to protect their turf) will have a vested interest in willing this new effort to fail has thus been subtly eliminated. The ID programme is a neutral, non-threatening one. You can use it if you want to and over time you may benefit from using it, but it in no way impinges on the initiatives and territories of other players.

Also, from the perspective of Indian residents (note the emphasis on residents the determination of citizenship is left to existing authorities like the passport officer) the entire programme is positioned as a voluntary one. There is no totalitarian Mussolini forcing you to get an ID number. This should make civil libertarians feel good. Just like people who have Internet access voluntarily get themselves e-mail addresses, most residents of India will want to get themselves a national ID number.

And this will be true of the rich who need driver's licences, passports and bank accounts as well as the poor who need ration cards and NREGA payments. The key feature of the system as conceived is that once a critical mass is built, the installed base will grow by popular demand, not by fiat. Theoretically a hermit in a cave need not apply for an ID number and that is as it should be. As a committed libertarian, this aspect of the programme appeals to me. It is as though we have a supportive state, not an intrusive big brother.

The technological architecture involved (both hardware and software, but primarily software) in pulling off this task is by no means going to be simple. This is especially true for the initial enlistment process. In order to ensure the integrity of the process, every time a new person applies for it, the system would need to run a negative check across hundreds of millions of existing IDs (and eventually across 1.2 billion IDs) and this would need to be done on a near-real-time basis.

No one anywhere in the world has attempted anything on this scale. Those who are not sensitive to the technical implications should just trust this writer. Trust me, this is a stupendous task. To some extent this could end up resembling the US mission to the moon. That effort led to technical spin-offs and advances in so many related fields. I have a hunch that we might face a similar situation and a similar set of opportunities. The ID project may actually end up making an IT superpower out of us in a very real sense not just with marketing hype, which has been in part our story so far.

And this will be both in hardware (India may end up becoming the biggest and most advanced user of biometric readers) as well as in software (we will be the first to figure out how to capture, store and retrieve all in near-real-time scenarios a few billion photographs and tens of billions of biometric data elements).

For someone who went into the meeting as a sceptic, I came out with a profound if cautious sense of optimism. This national project has a greater than 50 per cent chance of success and it is in all our interests to support it to make sure that that probability goes up. The practicality of the approach and the calmness with which we are approaching the stupendous technical challenges would indicate that in the months to come the probability of success will keep going up.

--From yahoo India reproduced

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