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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Unique ID better than PC smart card: Montek by Nishit Dholabhai


The Planning Commission today said Nandan Nilekani’s unique identification (UID) numbers were a more practical option than P. Chidambaram’s smart cards when it comes to electronic transfer of benefits to the rural poor.

Plan panel deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said the UID numbers could be used even through “mobile telephones while the smart card can only be read by a card-reader”.

The commission and the home ministry have both been pushing the relative merits of their projects and today’s comments by Ahluwalia were the latest in the smart card-versus-UID number contest.

Ahluwalia expanded the scope of the number project, headed by tech leader Nilekani, to include sale of kerosene at market price in public distribution system shops, with the subsidy being electronically transferred to PDS beneficiaries.

“In my view, whatever we supply to the PDS should be supplied at the normal market price and the benefit we want to give should be electronically credited to the designated beneficiary,” Ahluwalia said.

The idea is to check black marketing, said a source.

Ahluwalia’s comments came in response to questions on a home ministry proposal under which a chip-based smart card would be issued to every resident on the basis of records maintained by the National Population Register (NPR), a digital database currently under preparation.

According to the home ministry, the UIDAI project — mandated to issue 200 million Aadhaar numbers to residents by the end of this fiscal — would be a duplication of efforts. Home minister Chidambaram had protested the expansion of the UIDAI project and wanted, instead, to issue smart cards that could be read with a non-Internet card-reader.

Ahluwalia said under the technology for the Rs 6,790-crore smart card project, the cards “can only be read by someone who actually has a card-reading device”.

Under the UIDAI project, “all the details are centrally stored and you identify the person with (unique) identity number through any secured mobile telephone connection”, he said.