The rollout of the unique identity numbers under the Aadhaar project within two years of the notification of the project, and a little more than a year after appointing its CEO, is a credible achievement of the UPA government. The scale of the project, combined with the fact that it is the first time that the country?s much acclaimed expertise in IT is being used on a such a massive scale, makes it a test case for using cutting-edge technology in governance. But the challenges are much greater than in the earlier projects, like the introduction of EVMs, where problems were largely of a technical nature. This is because though the rollout is expected to be smooth in the rural areas, where the gram sabhas and village elders can vouch for the identity of the people, the scenario is likely to be complicated in the cities, where it will be difficult to verify the credentials of the large migrant population. But though verification is a difficult task as documents can often be faked, the main advantage of the system is that it fully rules out any duplication of identities, as it is impossible to fake the biometric information.
Rolling out the numbers and setting up a central identities data repository that provides a uniform base for all identity verifications will only be the first step of Aadhaar, a term that means ?foundation?. The fact is that the social gains from the project will start only when the different public and private agencies start using the UIDs for verifying the credentials of the participants or beneficiaries in various projects. The potential gains are huge as this will be of great help not only to the large number of poor who have no documents to prove their identities, and which are often unscrupulously stolen to usurp their entitlements from the government that run into thousands of crores, but also to the different public and private agencies like the I-T authorities, the PDS, health agencies, pension and PF schemes, telecos, and banks whose limited resources are often substantially depleted by ghost entities and duplicates. Law & order agencies will also gain substantially as the crimes of habitual offenders can be quickly traced with the biometric evidence from the centralised agency. Whether Aadhar will be put to good use, and how long this will take, will of course depend upon how soon party chief Sonia Gandhi says it has to be used in various social security schemes.
