Column : Imagining India to Imaging India

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: “A big source of heartburn for those running banks, managing elections and regulating the stock market in India is that the country is filled with people who are virtually invisible... Today Indians can have a multitude of numbers with which to identify ourselves, depending on when and where we interact with the state... This makes zeroing in on a definite identity for each citizen particularly difficult, since each government department works a different turf and with different groups of people. The lack of a unique number has given space to plenty of phantoms—in voter lists and in below the poverty line (BPL) schemes and holding bank accounts with multiple PANs... Creating a national register of citizens, assigning them a unique ID and linking them across a set of national databases, like the PAN and passport, can have far-reaching effects in delivering public services better and targeting services more accurately... Too often though, we see issuing smart cards as the main challenge of implementing such a system. But building these intelligent little stripes is the easy part. It is in making the back-end infrastructure secure and scalable, providing a single record keeper for the whole country and integrating the agents who issue these numbers that it gets tough... An IT-enabled, accessible national ID system would be nothing less than revolutionary in how we distribute state benefits and welfare handouts; I believe it would transform our politics.”