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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Resident I-Cards run into Aadhaar roadblock-Sahil Makkar
-Live Mint
 
Divisions between the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI, or Aadhaar) and the home ministry grew wider on Thursday after the Nandan Nilekani-led entity and the department of information technology (DIT) raised objections to the Resident Identity Card (RIC) scheme.

Three high-ranking officials, who spoke independently and on condition of anonymity, said a meeting of the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) to clear Rs. 6,790 crore for the home ministry’s RIC project remained inconclusive. A fresh date is being sought to resolve the differences between the key stakeholders.

The meeting, called by expenditure secretary Sumit Bose, was attended by home secretary R.K. Singh, DIT secretary J. Satyanarayana, UIDAI deputy director general Anil Khachi, Planning Commission member secretary Sudha Pillai, Registrar General of India (RGI) C. Chandramouli and officials of various ministries and public sector firms.

The meeting was inconclusive “in a sense that costing of the project was not cleared. Usually, approval comes in the first meeting and second meeting is not required to clear any project,” said one of the three officials mentioned above.

“But there was a broader consensus on the off-line mode of the project. Objections from the DIT and UIDAI were finally laid to rest on the grounds that RIC is a necessary security requirement. The meeting was told that RIC does not come in way of online verification of Aadhaar number,” the official said.

Another official said a meeting of potential users of the card will now be called. “The users will give their suggestions on kind of applications required to be loaded on the card. There were suggestions to roll public distribution system and MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) schemes through the card,” the official said. “A meeting of different users will be called before another meeting of EFC to resolve the remaining issue.”

“The modalities to issue cards are still to be worked out. I think EFC will clear it in the next meeting,” said the third official, who was present in the meeting.

This is the second time the RIC scheme has run into trouble after opposition from UIDAI and DIT. Nilekani and Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia had opposed the RIC project in the past.

Earlier, the home ministry on the one side, and the Planning Commission and the UIDAI on the other, had fought a bitter and all-too-public battle over the scope of the Aadhaar project because it overlapped, in some aspects, with the National Population Register project (NPR).

A compromise was finally reached on 27 January that allowed the scope of the UIDAI project to be expanded to 600 million and seemingly prevented duplication in the collection of biometric information.

UIDAI director general R.S. Sharma and DIT secretary Satyanarayana refused to comment on the developments.

“We have made our points in the EFC and I don’t want to add anything more,” said Sharma.

The officials cited earlier said the next EFC meeting will take up another controversial proposal—that the RICs carry the Aadhaar number, making it unnecessary for UIDAI to send out letters to all enrolls.

Mint on Wednesday reported UIDAI’s objections to the proposal. “A letter is completion of our process,” an UIDAI official said in the report. “In a sense a letter delivered to a resident is a check that he exists. The letter is the final closing piece in Aadhaar cycle and it should go to every resident.”

The RIC programme was launched in India’s nine coastal states after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. The home ministry is seeking to extend the scheme to the rest of the country and has sought Rs. 6,700 crore to fund the programme. The card uses a chip that carries data, photographs and fingerprints of the holder.