UN E-Government Readiness Program- survey 2012
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/
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Bridging India’s identity divide with a number
The unique number promises India's first unimpeachable proof of identity for its residents
On a boiling afternoon in the city of Surat in Gujarat state, men and women are rolling into a cavernous hall in the local municipality building to sign up for India's most ambitious plan to give a definitive identity to millions of residents.
It takes all of 10 minutes for each person to have their details keyed into a laptop before they are photographed on a webcam and their fingerprints and iris are scanned in what is also the world's biggest biometric identity exercise.
Since it launched two years ago, 200 million Indians have already signed up to India's "unique identity" (UID) scheme.
By 2014, another 400 million people are expected to enrol to get a 12-digit unique identification number - also called Aadhaar or foundation - fulfilling the scheme's mandate to cover about half of India's people. The Economist magazine calls it an "astonishing outcome" in a country which struggles to meet its most fundamental challenges.
"I have no idea of how this will help me. I have heard that it will do us some good," says Neruben, a municipal sweeper, who is waiting for her turn in the municipality hall, which once served as a Mughal inn.
Faceless existence
Neruben earns 12,000 rupees ($218) a month and has a bank account, a voters' identity card and a Permanent Account Number (PAN) card from income tax authorities which helps in opening bank accounts and filing tax returns. Most Indians are not as fortunate as her.
Millions are bereft of what identity scheme chiefNandan Nilekani calls "any form of acknowledged existence", which essentially ends up depriving them of their rights and pushes them into a faceless existence.
Many have no birth certificates or school certificates. About 58% of the children born in India are registered at birth, according to Unicef. Of those who are registered, not all have birth certificates.
In one of the world's fastest growing economies, some 40% of people living in villages don't have bank accounts, the number rising to three-fifths of people living in the east and north-east of India. (It is another matter that more than 40% of India's earners have no savings.) One of the main reasons why they don't have a bank account is that they have no definitive proof of who they are.
Also, identity - when available - is fickle and dubious.
There are more than a dozen documents that are variously accepted as proof of identity - a'ration card' that enables the poor to buy cheap food and cooking fuel, a voters card which enables people to cast their ballots, a driving licence and a PAN card are only some of them.
But most of these can be obtained in a thriving black market by using fake documents and paying a hefty bribe - a ration card can be purchased for up to 60,000 rupees ($1,095), and in some slums in Mumbai I visited recently, residents openly spoke about "buying" PAN cards for 600 rupees ($11), 10 times the official rate, through agents.
Identity is also not easily movable in India.
'Cycle of documentation'
Papers that people have in villages are often of no value when they move to cities in a country which is witnessing migration on a scale never seen before. So every time a villager travels to a city to work, he is faced with the problem of securing new identification, often by paying bribes.
Sonu Yusuf Sheikh has no job because he does not have proof of ID
There is also what project head Nandan Nilekani calls the chokehold of the "cycle of documentation" on people. "To get a driver's licence you need a ration card, to get a ration card you need a birth certificate [and so on]," he says.
The unique identity number aims to equip people with one unimpeachable, portable national identity aimed at helping the poor to access state welfare, open bank accounts and protect them from rampant police harassment. It promises to slash corruption in India's multi-billion dollar rural jobs guarantee scheme by paying salaries through bank accounts linked to the identity number. It will also help pay pensions and salaries, as well as enabling people to obtain cooking gas and mobile phone connections.
Financial inclusion, say enthusiasts for the scheme, is one of the major ways the identity number can change India.
When the majority of people living in India's 60,000 villages have their identity number, they will be able to open bank accounts and access their money without trudging for miles to reach the nearest branch and lose out on a day's wages. (More than 80,000 commercial bank branches across India cater to only 5% of the villages.) Bank representatives - usually local people - will keep some money and use nifty mobile micro-automated teller machines to make instant small deposits and withdrawals.
But biometric identity is a contentious issue all over the world, and the unique number has also raised a number of thorny questions.
Is it an invasion of privacy? Eminent economist Jean Dreze has called it a "national security project in the garb of a social policy initiative". Will the identity database be more reliable than the existing lists of beneficiaries for welfare schemes for the poor? Don't bet on it, says Dr Dreze.
The overwhelming concern is over the danger of restricting civil liberties by creating what one critic of the scheme has called the "infrastructure of authoritarianism".
Last year a parliamentary panel echoed similar sentiments about access and misuse of personal information, surveillance, profiling and securing of confidential information by the government. Authorities insist that there are enough safeguards to ensure the data is secure and protected.
'Something good'
The real problem may be that some have begun believing that the number can be used to track down wrong-doers.
Identity is usually not portable in India
"Why can't we use this database to detect criminals? It would be good if we could do so," Anilbhai Biscuitwala, a senior businessman in Surat from the Hindu nationalist BJP party, told me.
read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-18141584
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Why India's identity scheme is groundbreaking
India is building the world's largest biometric database
In an audacious technological mission, India is building a near foolproof database of personal biometric identities for nearly a billion people, something that has never been attempted anywhere in the world.
Poorer Indians who have no proof to offer of their existence will leapfrog into a national online system, another global first, where their identities can be validated anytime anywhere in a few seconds.
"India will outdo the world's biggest biometric databases including those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US-VISIT visa programme," says Nandan Nilekani, the technology tycoon who heads the programme popularly called by its acronym UIDAI.
The United States' visa programme is a biometric database of 120 million.
In comparison, the UIDAI has already registered 200 million members, less than two years after the first enrolment.
By 2014 half of India's population will have an identity tagged to a random, unique 12-digit number.
Radical ideas
As more and more Indians have their fingerprints taken, irises scanned and photographs clicked, UIDAI's chief technology architect Pramod Varma describes the database structure as a "Google-meets-Facebook" scale out.
The information is stored in a fortress like data centre in Bangalore
With its internet-class open source backbone, the database will accommodate more than 12 billion fingerprints, 2.4 billion iris scans and 1.2 billion photographs.
Even more groundbreaking, once established and stored, a person's identity can easily be verified and authenticated using a cell phone, smart phone, tablet or any other device hooked to the internet.
The information is stored in a fortress-like data centre in Bangalore with a triple layer of security, and travels in highly encrypted packets.
Many of the radical ideas for UIDAI's technology have come from the talent the project has drawn from the Indian diaspora - tech entrepreneurs like Bala Parthasarathy of HP-acquired photo service, Snapfish and Silicon Valley returnees like Srikanth Nadhamuni, formerly with Intel.
Mr Nilekani himself co-founded and built the multi-billion dollar outsourcing company Infosys before being drafted by the government to head the project.
The programme has studied global best practices in biometric identity databases.
Unlike the United States' social security number, which is guessable and China's, which adds the date of birth, India's 12-digit identity number is randomly generated.
The United States' visa database does not factor in iris scans while India has included them to provide a greater degree of accuracy.
India's telecom revolution leapfrogged over several stages of technology in the past decade-and-a-half to great success. Similarly, the massive UIDAI will vault over older technologies.
"By starting on a clean slate and reconfiguring the structure, we have opened up a whole new set of possibilities," says Mr Nilekani.
The project will stay abreast of the latest in biometrics, cloud computing and connectivity.
Pilot projects using the unique number have begun in parts of India
Costs though have been kept low, first, by adopting an open policy in selecting devices and software and encouraging multiple private vendors.
Second, the project is technology-neutral, not locking in to any particular hardware or software.
If the technology architecture is unique, so is its accuracy in validating identities.
"The combination of 10-finger biometrics, two-iris scans and photograph establishes the identity of a person with over 99.5% accuracy," says Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO of Bangalore-based tech outsourcing firm MindTree, which is one of the firms building applications for the project.
The best of the biometric databases in the world have a single de-duplication check, to ensure that every person is identified and tagged only once.
Real challenge
UIDAI will de-duplicate three times over, accuracy that is vital in a country which has had a massive population migration in the past decade and welfare programmes that now total $60bn in value, says Ashok Dalwai, deputy director general of UIDAI.
"A lack of identity has become the divide in India, denying needy Indians access to welfare programmes," Mr Dalwai says.
In a country where billions of dollars in welfare get siphoned off by middlemen using fake identities, the programme will "stem leakage and fraud", he adds.
The real challenge for the project, however, will be in the applications built around the unique identities.
A slew of pilots are currently testing the robustness of the system.
In a trial in Tumkur near Bangalore, Indians armed with a new unique identity number are opening bank accounts electronically.
In the northern Jharkhand state, the government is electronically dispensing payments under an employment guarantee scheme directly into the recipients' bank accounts, which were opened after acquiring an identity number.
The project is technology-neutral, not locking in to any particular hardware or software.
In another pilot in the same region, people are authenticating themselves on a simple device connected to the network and withdrawing money from their new bank accounts.
In the future, every outlet with such a device can potentially serve as a cash-dispensing "micro ATM".
In the coming years, UIDAI holds the promise of being a game changer.
With a unique identity, previously anonymous poor Indians can have access to services such as bank accounts, mobile connections and driving licences.
