[Reader-list] National wastage system.?

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear Rajen,

All that is commendable however my questions were about a more mundane
matter. They were about plastic tokens. I would be grateful if you
could share your thoughts about what seems like a whim to invest such
a huge amount of public money on a national identity card. When even
in so called developed countries like UK, people are asking questions
about the validity of such an investment.

Do you think we would be better off as a nation in 2011, when the
survey related to the national population register would be complete?
If yes, then in what manner? How will a NPR benefit the country as a
whole? How do we know that funds appropriated for such an exercise
will not be directed for purposes of political patronage? What about
margin of error by the data entry people? When even in this general
election we have hundreds of thousands of instances of names being
fudged, addresses being misplaced and a submission by a minister
himself that it is not possible to identify all the voters. How are we
going to identify all Indians? How are we going to categorize people
who are undocumented as Indians in the first place? What about people
belonging to the third sex? What about migrant population? What about
beggars? Who will document them? How will they be documented? There
are 300-400 million transient population in India. IDP's add to this
figure. If on the one hand there seems to be no thought by the policy
makers on this issue, then don't you think, that this whole identity
card business seems like one more big scam, a money making enterprise,
inaugurated by the NDA and followed by the UPA in the name of
providing security to the people?? Even the most fundamental issue,
like the identity of person is still not resolved, why are we being
fed this propaganda that carrying a card will help us identify
ourselves as ourselves?

Taha