[Reader-list] News Items posted on the net on Multipurpose National Identity Cards-113

[Taha Mehmood]

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2328390,prtpage-1.cms

Now, for the born identity
1 Sep 2007, 1100 hrs IST, S Srinivasan, TNN
A year ago, when Mumbai was still recovering from the shock of the
7/11 serial train explosions, a man obtained four pre-paid mobile
phone
connections in the name of A N Roy and submitted a copy of a ration
card, employment verification and some sort of an identity card (ID)
as supporting documents. Only later, was it discovered that he was
impersonating the city’s police chief and the documents had been
forged.

Around the same time, Haryana police discovered that the mobile phones
used in various crimes had been taken in the names of innocent people
and nearly 2 lakh ‘benami’ connections were active in the state alone.
The scandals prompted the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to
order physical verification of all subscribers.

Sixty years after its independence, India may have emerged as an
economic power and a technology hub, but it still doesn’t know its
citizens. Though that may be a daunting task. From mobile phone
connections to border crossings, from welfare schemes to banking, the
field remains open for all bogus operations depending on the lack of
or confusion over identity.

The government sometimes ends up giving welfare benefits to hustlers
bringing phony records, while businesses are finding it impossible to
extend their services to villages where keeoing records is nearly
non-existent. Despite listing dozens of primary documents as identity
proof, the country has not been able to issue even one such document
to all its citizens.

Thus, an urgent need has arisen for a national debate on why India is
struggling to identify its citizens and what can be done to fix the
problem? After all, with software powerhouses serving the globe from
our backyard, it should be just a matter of some money and neat
planning to create a country register of citizens.

The government, too, is impatient to have a multipurpose national
identity card system, if just to ward off illegal immigrants and the
import of terrorism from across the borders. But questions are being
raised on whether such a centralised, nationwide system would be an
asset or a liability?

It may be easy to dismiss the calls for national identification as the
greedy urgings of big business, technology providers and card makers.
It would be equally easy to brush off protests against the card system
as the ravings of paranoid liberal forces. However, for the largely
poor India, the need is to have hassle-free access to economic and
social gains that only a national ID card may give.

A senior civil servant, in a chat with ET, recalls the problems faced
while providing relief to the survivors of the tsunami attack in
December 2004. The first problem was the identification of the
thousands of dead being washed ashore. The next was to decide who to
give emergency relief supplies to, among the thousands of families
queuing up.

Indigent families from the hinterland, unaffected by the tsunami but
still hungry and penniless, masqueraded as survivor families.
Initially, when the government had not yet centralised the relief
mechanism under its oversight, the strong and aggressive walked away
with most of the relief from voluntary organisations. The meek and the
old were left to fend for themselves.

“We had to go through a very complicated process of identification of
beneficiaries, because many families had lost their primary documents
such as ration cards and electricity bills in the tsunami. Many
families didn’t even have such documents (in any case),” says J
Radhakrishnan, now additional finance secretary to the Tamil Nadu
government, and the collector of Nagapattinam district, the mainland
district worst affected by the killer waves, in early 2005.

“In sheer anxiety to make sure they got relief, some claimed relief in
two places. The husband would apply in his village and the wife would
apply in her village,” he says. Authorities had to hold back benefits
when such attempts were found out, adding to the overall desperation.

In fact, poor identification systems and the resulting legal quarrels
have forced the Madras High Court to put on hold the allotment of
nearly 1,400 newly built houses, meant for tsunami survivors, in
Chennai. Affected families live in temporary shelters nearly three
years after the tragedy, unable to move into the empty houses waiting
for the mighty keys of the law to turn.


Unbankable identity

The dilemma of doubtful identification is equally daunting in peace
time. Banks, keen to step up their lending to rural and urban poor
through their microfinance plans, come to a grinding halt when a
potential customer fails to bring up any verifiable document. “How do
I know whose credit I am checking?” asks Nachiket Mor, deputy managing
director of ICICI Bank. A national identity card would remove the
burden from the shoulders of business houses which will be able to
transact with confidence, he says.

In early 2006, the controversies related to the state-ordered closure
of 50 branches of two MFIs in Andhra Pradesh highlighted, among other
things, the problem of disparate customer databases. The same borrower
took money from several MFIs, often borrowing from one to repay
another, and none the wiser for it. Poor people couldn’t resist the
temptation when institutions pushed offers to them, and ended up in a
vicious spiral of indebtedness.

Five years ago, India made a beginning to issue citizen ID cards, by
proposing a pilot of Multipurpose National Identity Card (MNIC)
project in select border districts. The main inspiration for the
National Democratic Alliance leadership was the need to enhance
national security and tackle infiltration of potential troublemakers
from across the borders.

The United Progressive Alliance , too, has continued with it, but the
project is already mired in problems with a writ petition against the
award of a contract and claims that many entries in the database had
become outdated by now. Efforts to get the views of the government and
officials of Bharat Electronics, a state-run company involved in the
project, were not successful.

But credit must be given to the government project for being able to
issue two million cards so far, no mean task given the complexity of
such a large project, a smart card technology official said. The
Financial Information Network & Operations (FINO), which has issued
two lakh smart cards to microfinance customers of various banks and
wants to share its know-how with the government for the national card
project, says processes very effective in small scale become useless
at such high numbers. “After all, we are a country of numbers,” says
FINO’s CEO Manish Khera. (See story below).

No simplistic answers

Paper or plastic cards would be useless for national identity because
they can easily be forged. It is imperative that such a card has
memory and keeps personal data about its holder, but in a country
having 50 crore illiterate and semi-illiterate people, a biometric
record such as fingerprints are the only viable signatures.

But then, when one fingerprint is verified against 110 crore samples,
thousands may be identified as possible matches. A simplistic system
would only lead to confusion. Therefore, the first challenge for the
government is to create a fail-safe system at such a large scale,
Khera says.

Many observers say the home ministry must involve the finance ministry
in its national card project. The latter has the experience of issuing
permanent account numbers to taxpayers and may also require to evolve
fair-play systems for the recording of financial transactions on the
card.


The PAN card itself, if it could be upgraded to a smart card system
and scope for multiple membership removed, can potentially serve as a
national ID card. Next, the government must adopt innovative formats
and involve a cross-section of the industry to increase the quality
and speed up the pace of the MNIC project, Jagdish Rajpurohit, a maker
of smart card personalisation systems and a litigant against the
national project, says.

His petition to the Bombay High Court challenging the award of a
contract is still pending and he says the project, in its current
form, will struggle to scale up or provide the back-end meaningful
identification systems. His claim is that the government, its
companies and a small team were all that were working on a project,
trying everything, from design to manufacture to back-end maintenance.
Several off-the-shelf technologies could be used and modern,
interoperable systems chosen, to speed up the project.

“The basic problem with the MNIC project is that it is run by
bureaucrats. The technology framework for such a vital project should
be decided by the industry, not by bureaucrats,” Rajpurohit says. “The
project is necessary. Smart cards allow you to transact, monitor,
record transactions... But the whole tragedy of this project has been
that some people in the government have not realised that they are the
end-users of the technology, not its propagators.”

Supporters of the national ID card system say it can go beyond that
scope and pack a lot of other documents, access rights and transaction
records in them. Driver licences, ration cards, road and train
tickets, toll passes and banking records can be stored in such a card.
“The potential of a smart card-based ID card is limited only by the
nation’s imagination,” says Rajpurohit. Stories across the world have
both pleasant and ugly examples to show on the use of national
identity cards. They also offers lessons to learn. (See box).

Big brother watching?

“The implementation of such a scheme represents a vast increase in
police power; a troubling prospect given the state of Indian policing
and the excessive control of the Executive in its functioning,” says
Ravi Nair of South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, which has
published papers on the precaution needed to be taken in a national ID
card system. The national ID card system would have a centralised
register of citizens that can be prone to hacking or data corruption,
while it may be easy for anyone trying to pass off as a bonafide
citizen to forge one national card than a bouquet of identity
documents as of now.

More importantly, it could lead to loss of privacy for the citizen,
whose activities could be continuously monitored given the usage
patterns of the ID card. But then, “the concerns do not necessarily
mean that India’s planned MNIC programme must be discarded, but they
signal a need for oversight to protect the privacy and equality
rights,” Nair says.

All things considered, India’s need to identify each of its citizens
beyond doubt can hardly be emphasised, if it were to take the benefits
of economic growth to those who need it the most and secure its
sovereignty. But, the government must not design the card to suit
itself, but the people it aims to protect. Yet, the identity crisis
continues.

(With inputs from Rashmi Pratap, Harsimran Julka)