From E-gov to Mgovernance: UID Prepares India for the Future

In less than ten months from now, India will witness a new revolution; and its people will get to experience their first complete, unique identity. All packed into sixteen simple digits that possibly hold an answer to the above question.

For a nation riding on multiple citizen identities and a large number of ghost ones, Indian governments ambitious Unique ID project signals a new revolution in the countrys socio-economic growth. The UID is not just another identity card to hold/possess. It promises to be every Indians gateway to social and economic inclusion.

Think about it. How often you had to quiz or have been quizzed by your bank official, airline desk manager, new landlord or even the new insurance dealer about the right kind of identity proof for your paperwork? Being an average Indian, chances are that you are still counting. As you move down the socio-economic fabric of India, challenges of working with multiple identity proofs without linkages across systems increase. Here, having an identity is often the first and only step towards survival in Indias big cities.

Strengthening from Inside Out

With Reserve Bank of Indias new regulation on Know Your Customer, UID brings twin benefitsa foolproof personal identification mechanism that complements the internal security system and a window to deliver governments socio-economic agenda. Promising uniqueness and existence, UID will offer real-time authentication of a persons identity.

UID can transform Indias administrative mechanism, making it more responsive and all pervasive. Accurate data of UID will enhance the efficiencies of government welfare schemes. Increased coordination among government departments, in turn, will facilitate sharing of real-time information.

Moreover, the project will mainstream around 700 mn people who remain outside the system. By enabling storing of both demographic and biometric information of residents in a central database, it will be possible for agencies to minimize and neutralize any chances of duplication.

The database will be developed jointly by multiple government and private agencies. These include mobile service providers, cooking gas outlets, passport offices, National Rural Employment Guarantee Authority (NREGA) and public distribution authorities. The agencies would register the details of applicants and information will be stored in the Central ID Data Repository (CIDR).

The impact of eliminating duplicationsavings of `20,000 crore a year to the government exchequeris a small indication of the impact UID will have. The UID project also offers greater cost optimization. Nandan Nilekani has pointed out that UID can enable telecom companies save identification and verification costs. Similarly, the Unique Identification Number (UIN) can help state governments in cutting down the spendings in issuing ration cards. Normally, state governments typically spend between `20 to `50 to issue a ration card.

The telecom and e-governance segments may have an upswing because of the UID project. In fact, with UID project, we may see India shift from e-governance to m-governance in order to address the vexed issues of inclusive growth and national security gaps. The extent of this is best explained by the move made by the Center for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), a telecom research and development organization, in starting a study to understand the possibility of converting UID numbers into mobile numbers for its owners. Also, Indias position as a global IT and telecom powerhouse will be enhanced by the success of UID. Also, it would open new growth avenues for other allied sectors.

A Single Source for All Information

The impact of UID will open a realm of future possibilities. Filing tax returns, buying property or paying every day bills or getting a loan will become simpler with this simple sixteen digit identity.

The single repository of an individuals personal informationlike date and place of birth, name of father and mother and their UID numbers, address, photograph and fingerprintsCIDR will verify key demographic fields of an applicant before accepting the data. UID will do an online verification of a person and assign a unique number to the individual.

Although a new concept for India, the system of online authentication is being already followed actively and optimized in diverse ways globally. In Columbia, ID cards are mandatory to enter public places like airport and stations; while in the UK, passport can be renewed only if you have an ID.

The challenge for India, however, is unique. With over a billion people, UID will eclipse the United States repository of 120 mn people.

Former Infosys head, Nandan Nilekaniwhos powering the projecthas the tough task of preparing a database of 80 mn income tax payers, approximately 200 mn account holders in public and private banks, some 500 mn mobile phone consumers and over 600 mn voter identity card
holders.

So, stakes for this project are clearly high and diverse. Not many of us are aware about the volume of work involved in establishing and managing a database of 1.2 bn people. Around 5 megabytes of data will be required to store the compressed fingerprint of each individual. That means size of the entire database would be roughly at least 6 petabytes (6,000 terabytes, or 6,000,000 gigabytes).

A Multi-billion Dollar Biz Opportunity

The huge operational canvas of the project opens up unbridled opportunities for allied sectors such as IT and telecom. It could play a crucial role in diverse fields such as education, medicine, banking and governance in general, where authentication is crucial.

Sensing the windfall, IT firms like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Spanco, Bartronics, Gemini Traze and NXP Semiconductors have joined the fray to bag the project, which according to rough estimates may eventually cost `10,000 crore. Bankers too see an opportunity in the UID project to extend their banking coverage to 60% of the population that remains outside the credit coverage.

The UID will not just safeguard identity of a billion Indians, it will also create the fit identity for millions of marginalized citizens who remain outside the system socially and economically.

Lt Col HS Bedi
The author is CMD, Tulip Telecom
dqmail@cybermedia.co.in