The much-awaited national unique identity card will make citizens eligible for a no-frills savings bank account and a cellular phone connection. This is because the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is aligning its verification norms for the unique ID cards with the ?know your customer? (KYC) norms of the Reserve Bank of India and the department of telecommunications.

?We are putting in place the verification norms for the unique ID cards, and trying to align them with the ?know your customer? norms for banks and cellphone firms. This would mean at the time of getting a UID card, a citizen can be given a no-frills savings account and a mobile connection straightaway,? UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani said here.

While the move would give a big push to the government?s financial inclusion agenda, Nilekani said the UIDAI?s work would also provide the foundation to bring real-time monitoring of services delivery to citizens. ?Today, beyond a point, most monitoring exercises hit a black hole. But, if the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) mandates the use of UIDs for the job card, muster roll and bank account, the monitoring you can do at each stage would be at a completely different level,? Nilekani said.

Nilekani said, ?We are getting people from the consumer market analytics space to build in evaluation as a by-product rather than something done post-facto. We hope to do this for four schemes over 2-3 years, keeping in mind our strategic objective of issuing a billion UID cards as soon as possible.?

The four schemes identified by the UIDAI chief, where UID cards could be applied for identifying beneficiaries and monitoring performance on a real-time basis, include the NREGS, the public distribution scheme (PDS), the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) and the newly launched Rajiv Aawas Yojana (RAY) for low-cost housing in urban India.

?If the PDS incorporates the UID with ration cards, a citizen can?t have two ration cards. When he or she comes to the ration shop, the UID will authenticate their eligibility and their purchases will be tracked on a real-time basis. This will generate crucial data on the offtake of essential commodities and make diversion difficult,? Nilekani explained.

NREGA covers over 65 million households and assuming each household has four members, over 200 million UIDs can be issued. PDS beneficiaries run into crores, while the JSY annually targets around 10 million pregnant women in states with high maternal mortality ratios.