[Reader-list] High-cost, high-risk -172

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear All

This is I think first time front line has published something on UIDC
especially after Nandu assumed post. The spin from this Hindu stable
publication is predictable and Ramakumar has done something different
by bringing in an aspect of history and then moving to the issue and
then analyzing it with other views.

Regards

Taha

http://www.frontline.in/stories/20090814261604900.htm

Frontline
Volume 26 - Issue 16 :: Aug. 01-14, 2009
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU

High-cost, high-risk

CONTROVERSY

High-cost, high-risk

R. RAMAKUMAR

The UPA government is going ahead with the ID card project, ignoring
criticisms and alternative suggestions.

WITH the appointment of Nandan Nilekani as the Chairperson of the
Unique Identification Authority (UIA), it is clear that the United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has decided to go ahead with the
controversial project to provide each Indian citizen with a unique and
multi-purpose identity card. The media are abuzz with commentators
praising the government for a landmark decision that would “change the
face of governance” in India. With contracts worth hundreds of crores
up for grabs, the IT industry too is in delight. “Bring them on! We
will fix it,” the tech industry appears to be claiming on what is
essentially a social problem.

The project was initiated by the National Democratic Alliance
government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2002. A perusal of its
history shows that the dirty groundwork had already been completed
under the NDA. The origins of the project can be traced back to the
controversial report of the Kargil Review Committee, appointed in the
wake of the Kargil War, in 1999. This committee was chaired by K.
Subrahmanyam and had as its members B.G. Verghese, Satish Chandra and
K.K. Hazari. In its report submitted in January 2000, the committee
noted that immediate steps were needed to issue ID cards to villagers
in border districts, pending its extension to other parts of the
country. By around 2001, a Group of Ministers of the NDA government
submitted a report to the government, titled Reforming the National
Security System. This report was based largely on the findings of the
Subrahmanyam Committee. The report noted:

“Illegal migration has assumed serious proportions. There should be
compulsory registration of citizens and non-citizens living in India.
This will facilitate preparation of a national register of citizens.
All citizens should be given a Multi-purpose National Identity Card
(MNIC) and non-citizens should be issued identity cards of a different
colour and design.”

In 2003, the NDA government initiated a series of steps to ensure the
smooth preparation of the national register, which was to form the
basis for the preparation of ID cards. The best way was to link the
preparation of the register with the Census of India. However, the
Census has always had strong clauses relating to the privacy of its
respondents. Thus, the Citizenship Act of 1955 was amended in 2003,
soon after the MNIC was instituted.

This amendment allowed for the creation of the post of Director of
Citizen Registration, who was also to function as the Director of
Census in each State. According to the citizenship rules notified on
December 10, 2003, the onus for registration was placed on the
citizen: “It shall be compulsory for every Citizen of India to…get
himself registered in the Local Register of Indian Citizens.” The
rules also specified punishments for citizens who failed to do so; any
violation was to be “punishable with fine, which may extend to one
thousand rupees”.

In other words, the privacy clauses relating to Census surveys were
diluted significantly by the NDA government in 2003 itself.

The UPA government has only carried forward the plans of the NDA
government under a new name. The MNIC project was replaced by the
National Authority for Unique Identity (NAUID), and placed under the
Planning Commission. The NAUID was established in January 2009, after
the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November 2008. However, the steps
to establish it had begun even before the Mumbai attacks.

According to a press release of the government dated November 10,
2008, the Unique Identity (UID) project would serve a variety of
purposes: “better targeting of government’s development schemes,
regulatory purposes [including taxation and licensing], security
purposes, banking and financial sector activities, etc.” The UID will
be “progressively extended to various government programmes and
regulatory agencies, as well as private sector agencies in the
banking, financial services, mobile telephony and other such areas.”
As per the interim budget of the UPA government in February 2009, the
UIA was established.

The public response to the ID project has been influenced by the
liberal praise that the media have showered on it. In fact, the nature
of reporting would have one in doubt on whether the praise is for the
project per se or for the appointment of the Chairperson. Some
commentators hailed Nilekani’s appointment as a first step in the
absorption of technocrats into government. It has also been argued
that ID cards would increase the efficiency of poverty alleviation
programmes. In fact, while better delivery of poverty alleviation
programmes is the stated primary objective of the project, it is no
one’s doubt that the actual primary objective is to address terrorism.

Indeed, the presence of identity cards for citizens in an electronic
format is a welcome measure. In specific sectors/schemes and in
specific contexts, it can increase the efficiency of service delivery.
At the same time, there are a number of reasons why the UIA project
has to be thoroughly critiqued, and even opposed.
PRIVACY & CIVIL LIBERTIES

First, international experience shows that very few countries have
provided national ID cards to citizens. The most important reason has
been the unsettled debate on the protection of privacy and civil
liberties. It has been argued that the data collected as part of
providing ID cards, and the information stored in the cards, may be
misused for a variety of purposes. For instance, there is the problem
of “functionality creep” where the card can serve purposes other than
its original intent. Some have argued that ID cards can be used to
profile citizens in a country and initiate a process of racial/ethnic
cleansing, as during the Rwanda genocide of 1995. Legislation on
privacy cannot be a guarantee against the possibilities of misuse of
ID cards.

Two countries where the issue of national ID cards has been well
debated are the United States and the United Kingdom. In both these
countries, the project was shelved after public protests. Countries
such as Australia have also shelved ID card schemes. While China
declared its intention to introduce an ID card, it later withdrew the
clause to have biometric data stored in such cards.

In the U.S., privacy groups have long opposed ID cards; there was
opposition also when the government tried to expand the use of the
social security number in the 1970s and 1980s. The disclosure of the
social security number to private agencies had to be stopped in 1989
following a public outcry. A health security card project proposed by
Bill Clinton was set aside even after the government promised “full
protection for privacy and confidentiality”.

Finally, the George W. Bush administration settled in 2005 for an
indirect method of providing ID cards to U.S. citizens. In what came
to be called a “de-facto ID system”, the REAL ID Act made it mandatory
for all U.S. citizens to get their drivers’ licences re-issued,
replacing old licences. In the application form for reissue, the
Department of Homeland Security added new questions that became part
of the database on driving licence holders. As almost all citizens of
the U.S. had a driving licence, this became an informal electronic
database of citizens. Nevertheless, these cards cannot be used in the
U.S. for any other requirement, such as in banks or airlines. The
debate on the confidentiality of the data collected by the U.S.
government continues to be alive even today.

The most interesting debate on the issue of national ID cards has been
in the U.K. With the introduction of the Identity Cards Bill of 2004,
the Tony Blair government declared its intent to issue ID cards for
all U.K. citizens. Public protests have forced the Labour government
to shelve the policy to date. The debate has mainly centred around the
critical arguments in an important research report on the desirability
of national ID cards prepared by the Information Systems and
Innovations Group at the London School of Economics (LSE). The LSE’s
report is worth reviewing here.
LSE’s REPORT

The report identified key areas of concern with the Blair government’s
plans, which included their high risk and likely high cost, as well as
technological and human rights issues. The report noted that the
government’s proposals “are too complex, technically unsafe, overly
prescriptive and lack a foundation of public trust and confidence”.
While accepting that preventing terrorism is the legitimate role of
the state, the report expressed doubts on whether ID cards would
prevent terror attacks through identity theft:

“…preventing identity theft may be better addressed by giving
individuals greater control over the disclosure of their own personal
information, while prevention of terrorism may be more effectively
managed through strengthened border patrols and increased presence at
borders, or allocating adequate resources for conventional police
intelligence work…. A card system such as the one proposed in the Bill
may even lead to a greater incidence of identity fraud…. In
consequence, the National Identity Register may itself pose a far
larger risk to the safety and security of U.K. citizens than any of
the problems that it is intended to address.”

In conclusion, the LSE report noted that “…identity systems may create
a range of new and unforeseen problems. These include the failure of
systems, unforeseen financial costs, increased security threats and
unacceptable imposition on citizens. The success of a national
identity system depends on a sensitive, cautious and cooperative
approach involving all key stakeholder groups, including an
independent and rolling risk assessment and a regular review of
management practices. We are not confident that these conditions have
been satisfied in the development of the Identity Cards Bill. The risk
of failure in the current proposals is therefore magnified to the
point where the scheme should be regarded as a potential danger to the
public interest and to the legal rights of individuals.”
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

Secondly, an interesting aspect of the discussion in India is the
level of technological determinism on display. It would appear that
the problem of citizenship can be fixed by the use of technology. The
fact that the UIA is to be headed by a technocrat like Nilekani, and
not a demographer, is evidence to this biased view of the government.
The problems of enumeration in a society like India’s, marked by
illegal immigration as well as internal migration, especially of
people from poor labour households, are too enormous to be handled
effectively by a technocrat. It is intriguing that the duties of the
Census Registrar and the UIA Chairperson have been demarcated, and
that the UIA Chairperson has been placed as a Cabinet Minister above
the Census Registrar.

Such technological determinism has been a feature of efforts to
introduce ID cards in other countries too, such as the U.K. The
rhetorical confidence of the U.K. government in the scheme has always
sat uncomfortably with its own technological uncertainty regarding the
project. Critics pointed out that a slight failure in any of the
technological components may immediately affect underlying confidence
of people in the scheme as a whole. For instance, the LSE report
noted:

RAJANISH KAKADE/AP

Shiv Kumar Chinna Coundar in Mumbai with a temporary ID card issued by
a fishermen’s society that allows him to work while waiting for a
state-issued ID card, which became compulsory for all fishermen on the
open seas after the November 2008 terror attack on Mumbai. The origins
of the ID card project can be traced to the Kargil Review Committee
report, which noted that immediate steps were needed to issue ID cards
to villagers in border districts, pending its extension to other parts
of the country.

“The technology envisioned for this scheme is, to a large extent,
untested and unreliable. No scheme on this scale has been undertaken
anywhere in the world. Smaller and less ambitious systems have
encountered substantial technological and operational problems that
are likely to be amplified in a large-scale, national system. The
proposed system unnecessarily introduces, at a national level, a new
tier of technological and organisational infrastructure that will
carry associated risks of failure. A fully integrated national system
of this complexity and importance will be technologically precarious
and could itself become a target for attacks by terrorists or others.”

Blair, nevertheless, was an ardent advocate of the ID card scheme. In
an article in The Daily Telegraph, he argued that ID cards were
required to secure U.K’s borders and ease modern life, and that “the
case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern
world”. Responding to the invocation of modernity, Edgar A. Whitley,
Reader at LSE and a member of its research team, noted that
“intellectually, technological determinism seemed to us to reduce the
intimate intertwining of society and technology to a simple
cause-and-effect sequence.”

Thirdly, would the ID card scheme result in an increase in the
efficiency of the government’s poverty alleviation schemes? According
to Nilekani, the ID card “will help address the widespread
embezzlement that affects subsidies and poverty alleviation
programmes”. However, it is difficult to foresee any major shift in
the efficiency frontiers of poverty alleviation programmes if ID cards
are introduced. The poor efficiency of government schemes in India is
not because of the absence of technological monitoring. The reasons
are structural, and these structural barriers cannot be transcended by
using ID cards.
COMPREHENDING SOCIAL REALITIES

Take one claim – unique ID cards would lead to “better targeting of
government’s development schemes”. Here is where the thinking behind
the ID cards fails to comprehend the social realities that reduce the
access of needy sections to welfare schemes. If we apply the argument
to the Public Distribution System (PDS), it would imply that the
government could ensure that only BPL households benefit from the
scheme. But the most important problem with the PDS in India is not
that non-BPL households benefit from it but that large sections are
not classified as BPL in the first place.

Further, there are major problems associated with having a
classification of households as BPL or APL based on a survey conducted
in one year, and then following the same classification for many
years. Incomes of rural households, especially rural labour
households, fluctuate considerably. A household may be non-poor in the
year of survey, but may become poor the next year because of
uncertainties in the labour market. How will an ID card solve this
most important barrier to efficiency in the PDS?

Yet another claim is that a simple cash-transfer scheme, which can
replace existing poverty alleviation programmes, will become possible
if ID cards are introduced. To begin with, cash-transfer schemes have
not been found to be efficient substitutes for public works schemes in
any part of the developing world. In addition, for the same reasons
discussed in the context of the PDS, a cash-transfer scheme would also
lead to the exclusion of a large number of needy from cash benefits.
An ID card cannot be of any help in such scenarios.

Also, the case of BPL cards cited above cannot be considered as a
special case. Given that the BPL population has special privileges in
many social welfare provisions, this would also be a larger and
persistent problem in the use of ID cards for any purpose in the
social sector.

Fourthly, the costs involved in such a project are always enormous and
have to be weighed against the limited benefits that are likely to
follow. In India, the cost estimated by the government itself is a
whopping Rs.1.5 lakh crore. Even after the commitment of such levels
of expenditures, the uncertainty over the technological options and
ultimate viability of the scheme remains. In addition, it is unclear
whether recurring costs for maintaining a networked system necessary
for ID cards to function effectively have been accounted for by the
government.

In the case of the U.K., the LSE report noted that the costs of the
scheme were significantly underestimated by the government. The
critique of the LSE group on the costing exercise of the U.K.
government is a good case study of why the costs of such schemes are
typically underestimated. The LSE group estimated that the costs would
lie between £10.6 billion and £19.2 billion, excluding public or
private sector integration costs. This was considerably higher than
the estimate of the U.K. government.

Apart from the reasons discussed above, there are other simple
questions for which answers are not easily forthcoming. Suppose a poor
household, which has been regularly using the ID card, loses the card.
Would that mean that all the benefits to the household will cease
until a new card is provided (that is surely to take many weeks in the
Indian context)? Why cannot we think of other options, such as
providing separate electronic cards for some of the very important
schemes? What happens to the use of ID cards in villages that do not
even have electricity, leave alone Internet connections?
MISUSE OF DATABASE

In conclusion, the ID card project of the UPA government, which is the
continuation of a hawkish idea of the NDA, appears to be missing the
grade on most criteria. There is no reason to disbelieve the argument
that the centralised database of citizens could be misused to profile
citizens in undesirable and dangerous ways.

The scheme is extraordinarily expensive. There is an unrealistic
assumption behind the project that technology can be used to fix the
ills of social inefficiencies. The benefits from the project, in terms
of raising the efficiency of government schemes, appear to be limited.

This is not to argue against any form of electronic management of data
or provision of services. It may certainly be useful to have an
identity card for citizens, which can be made use of in any part of
the country for identification as well as for availing themselves of
certain minimum benefits. At present, roughly 80 per cent of India’s
citizens have an election ID card. The use of this ID card can be
easily expanded, with some innovation, to convert it into a master
card for a specified set of purposes.

But what is the social benefit of centralising all information and
access to welfare schemes into one smart card? Unfortunately, the UPA
government has skipped public debate around criticisms and alternative
suggestions. •

R. Ramakumar is with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.