[Reader-list] News Items posted on the net on Multipurpose National Identity Cards-91

[Taha Mehmood]

http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=333627

Business Standard
Saturday, Feb 07, 2009




Sreelatha Menon: Not so smart after all
Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi September 07, 2008, 1:54 IST


India could end up spending Rs 5,000 crore on smart cards for pensions
and health insurance, not all of which 'speak' to each other.
  	
The Rajasthan government plans to distribute 5 million smart cards,
each the size of your normal debit/credit card, as part of a financial
inclusion scheme called Bhamasha. The cards have Rs 1,500 of credit
pre-loaded in them, and can be cashed at the nearest Punjab National
Bank branch. A lakh such cards have been issued and the process of
identifying beneficiaries and getting their details (name,
fingerprints, etc) and verifying them is on.

The card also has fields which can be used for other schemes in
future, like PDS, pensions and so on. So, theoretically, the card can
be used for other schemes as well, such as the central government's
Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) under which a total of 300
million smart cards are to be issued (to 60 million families) across
the country over the next five years. The RSBY card allows
beneficiaries to get cashless treatment worth Rs 30,000 each year at
various public and private sector pre-specified hospitals — in return
for a premium of Rs 30 (the rest of the premium is paid by the central
and state governments). While states like Assam, Tripura and Delhi
have already rolled out the scheme, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Kerala and
West Bengal are readying to issue them.

Though it's early days yet, a plethora of similar smart card-schemes
are being planned by various state governments as well. All told, when
complete, the schemes hold the promise of completely transforming how
the government will deliver services/subsidies to the target audience.
Instead of ration shop food, for instance, fixed amounts of money can
just be put into the State Bank of India, say, and the bank can then
transfer the exact funds needed for residents in Jhumritalalya in
Bihar. Ditto for the labour payments for job work done under the
NREGA.

The Andhra government, for instance, is in the process of distributing
biometric smart cards for NREGA payments and a successful pilot
programme has been running for a while in a few villages in Karimnagar
and Warangal districts. Orissa and Karnataka are also in the process
of doing the same. While costs vary depending on the volumes, by and
large, the process costs around Rs 100-120 per person.

The problem, however, is that the smart card dream is fast
deteriorating into a Tower of Babel with, believe it or not, the cards
not designed to 'talk' to each other. A good example of this, and the
sheer waste involved in the programme, is what happened with the
Rajasthan Bhamasha cards and the central government's RSBY. Since the
RSBY was to be implemented in Rajasthan anyway and through smart cards
as well, the Rajasthan government asked the central government to
implement the scheme in the state using its cards.

Logically, there is no reason why the Rajasthan cards cannot be used,
according to Vijay Mahajan, chairman and managing director of Basix
which, along with IL&FS, is responsible for distributing the cards in
Rajasthan — it has enough fields for the RSBY required data to be fed
in, apart from the data required by the Rajasthan government.

According to Mahajan, the problem lies in the fact that there hasn't
been a technical working group which has laid down clear standards
that everyone putting out smart cards follows. If such a group had
been set up, for instance, there would be set protocols that would
allow different cards to be 'read' by different programmes in the same
way, for instance, most computer software can read files created in
other software as well. So, logically, people living in Rajasthan
should be able to get their Rs 1,500 from the Punjab National Bank
branch and also be able to use this card to get treatment worth Rs
30,000 from an Apollo Hospital, say, in the region. Yet, the central
government refused to accept the Rajasthan cards and said the RSBY
would not be implemented through these cards. So, when the RSBY is
finally implemented in Rajasthan, another lot of new smart cards will
be issued, immediately doubling the cost of issue. If there are six
pan-Indian schemes being implemented for 300 million people, this will
cost Rs 18,000 crore instead of just Rs 3,000 crore for a single and
well-designed card with all schemes operating on the same card.

Worse, the cards are even locked into certain banks. The Rajasthan
cards, for instance, are locked into the Punjab National Bank software
and, right now, government officials there are trying to see how other
banks, such as the State Bank of India can be used for the scheme. In
other words, standards haven't been set so that different cards issued
can be used by different banks.

Interestingly, the home ministry was, at one point, planning to issue
National ID cards, but nothing has come of this. In an ideal
situation, this should have been the parent card with additional
fields for pensions, NREGA payments, financial inclusion schemes and
so on, and the National Informatics Centre or the Ministry of
Information Technology should have laid out standards to ensure this
card was compatible with other schemes. Instead, as is happening now,
each department/state is coming out with its own card. (The food
ministry, it appears, may however, refrain from issuing its own card
and may piggyback on the home ministry one.)

Fortunately, all may still not be lost. According to Mahajan, the
architecture of cards is such that the only real difference is where
the data is stored and how it is stored. As Jagdish Rajpurohit,
general secretary of Smart Card Forum of India, puts it,
'Interoperability is an issue which players have to decide.
Technically, the smart cards are interoperable as they speak the same
language.' According to Purohit, the problem stems from the fact that
users, such as banks, just don't want to share data. And until this
happens, the problem of multiple cards instead of one or two, and of
them not being able to talk to each other will remain.

Rishi Gupta, President and CFO of Fino which was the architect of RSBY
says that while the NREGP cards are built using a JAWA platform, the
RHBY cards are built using a SCOSTA platform. Gupta says there is no
national policy as such on the use of a common standard. That has to
come if confusion has to be avoided. If SCOSTA is to become the
national platform or national smart language then all the other cards
would have to be reissued in that language. There is no other option
for now, says Gupta.

So it is over to the Government now to announce a national language
for smart cards or see the country's smart initiatives collapse like a
house of cards.