[Reader-list] Rahul Gandhi to be guest of honour at workshop on NREGA- 204

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear Ram,

Thank you for your mail.

I think the points raised by you, on the notion of identity itself are
certainly pertinent but the views expressed by the likes of GOI are
worthy of some consideration too. The GOI contends that in order to
govern, it  has to know who are being governed and in order to know,
the governed needs to be given some sort of an identity.
Philosophically speaking identity as an idea or as a notion, is a
deeply contentious and a confusing issue but bureaucratically, many
people believe this issue can be solved by affixing numbers.

Numbers don't decay, neither do they die, nor do they suffer from any
wear and tear. Therefore unique alphanumeric numbers can be attached
persons from cradle to grave thus fixing the identity of a person to
that particular person.

 At least theoretically I find this view reasonable and rational, the
only problem is in its practice. Who is going to fix numbers? How the
process is going to be carried out? Who will verify and so on?
Of-course there are those who view the idea of fixing numbers on human
beings through moral and ethical lenses, therefore they believe it is
wrong to objectify a 'sacred' entity like a human being by capturing
it within numbers.

I also think that by giving identity numbers to people there are
certainly some benefits to be had, and if these numbers are digitally
coded through smart card technology then it does results in an ease of
operations, saving of time and so on. We all have our debit and credit
cards our passports and so on and we have also seen how terribly
useful they are in certain situations however I also think, one need
to seriously consider the extent or the scale of benefits claimed
before proceeding with the distribution not to mention the manner in
which this process must be carried out.

So the debate around identity as it is imagined by three major
institutions like the State or the academia or even the civil
liberties groups seems to be revolving around a deeply complex
terrain. I have not included the business as another major institution
here because they are interested in the idea of penetrating the
markets and it obviously makes of good business sense to have a big
client like a national government to provide some service or a product
which could account for maximum efficiency.

Your cost argument could actually come in this sphere and we have been
trying to think through the budgeting aspect of NID for a long time.
There are several problems here to begin with- No one exactly knows
how much will the damn exercise is going to cost?

The reason being that GOI's official position is limited to the
budgetary allocation. Therefore a meager figure of 120 crore sets the
limit to the official line as far as the UIDAI is concerned. So
insofar as the Finance ministry or the Ministry of Home Affairs or the
Planning Commission is concerned, the official line is 120 crore.

However we can arrive at a cumulative figure of 1.5 lakh crore by
taking into consideration the amount which was sanctioned for the MNIC
card project for a population of 30 lakh and subsequently projecting
it to a population of a billion people.

Apart from the cost factor, there is one more interesting dimension to
the whole exercise, which is quite funny- if we take into
consideration the -time- taken for the officials of the RGI to
complete the pilot project and project it to a billion people then it
will take about 4000 years for the survey to complete.

This is absolutely ridiculous! Just like the sum of 1.5 Lakh crore
rupees apportioned for the distribution of the cards. But we urgently
need some sort of figures, official figures from a primary source
belonging to the GOI before we can move beyond reasonable speculation.

Warm regards

Taha