ANNEXURE

HOMEWORK TITLE/NO: TERM PAPER COURSE CODE:

MGT 301

COURSE INSTRUCTOR: MR. HARENDRA SINGH COURSE TUTOR

(if applicable):

DATE OF ALLOTMENT: DATE OF

SUBMISSION: 15/11/10

STUDENT’S ROLL NO.: B41 SECTION

NAME: S1804

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signature: VARUN SINGH

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TOPIC:- UNIQUE IDENTIFICATION NUMBER

Introduction
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is an agency of the Government of
India responsible for implementing the envisioned Multipurpose National Identity Card or
Unique Identification card (UID Card project in India. It was established in February 2009,
and will own and operate the Unique Identification Number database. The authority will aim
at providing a unique number to all Indians, but not smart cards. The authority would provide
a database of residents containing very simple data in biometrics.

The agency is headed by a chairman, holds a cabinet rank. The UIDAI is part of the Planning
Commission of India. Nandan Nilekani, a former co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, was
appointed as the first Chairman of the authority in June 2009. Ram Sewak Sharma, an IAS
Officer of Jharkhand Government cadre has been appointed as the Director General and
Mission Director of the Authority. He is known for his best effort in e-Governance project for
Jharkhand State and working as an IT secretary he received a number of awards for best
Information Technology Trends State in India.

Unique Identification Authority of

India
भारतीय िविशष पहचान पािधकरण

UIDAI (Aadhaar UIDAI new logo)

Agency overview
Formed February 2009
Jurisdiction Government of India (Union Government)
Headquarters New Delhi
Annual budget 3,000 crore (US$ 681 million) (2010)
Nandan Nilekani, Chairman
Agency executives Ram Sewak Sharma, Director General and Mission
Director
Website
uidai.gov.in
Launch

UIDAI launched AADHAAR program in the tribal village, Tembhli, in Nandurbar,

Maharashtra on 29th September, 2010. The program was inaguated by Prime Minister,
Manmohan Singh along with UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. The first resident to receive an
AADHAAR was Rajana Sonawane of Tembhli village.

Coverage, goals and logistics

It is believed that Unique National IDs will help address the rigged state elections,
widespread embezzlement that affects subsidies and poverty alleviation programs such as
NREGA. Addressing illegal immigration into India and terrorist threats is another goal of the
program.

Most reports suggest that the plan is for each Indian citizen to have a unique identification
number with associated identifying biometric data and photographs by 2011. However, other
reports claim that obtaining a unique number would be voluntary, but those that opt to stay
out of the system "will find it very inconvenient: they will not have access to facilities that
require you to cite your ID number."

Government issued IDs are fragmented by purpose and region in India, which results in
widespread bribery, denial of public services and loss of income, especially afflicting poor
citizens. As the unique identity database comes into existence, the various identity databases
(voter ID, passports, ration cards, licenses, fishing permits, border area id cards) that already
exist in India are planned to be linked to it. The Authority is liaising with various national,
state and local government entities to begin this process. The Union Labor Ministry has
offered its verified Employment Provident Fund (EPFO) database of 42 million citizens as
the first database to be integrated into the unique ID system.

Other UID projects implemented on a smaller scale in India can also facilitate in the
development of the national project. An example is a project developed by Wolf Frameworks
Cloud Computing vendor and Social Education and Development Society (SEDS) for
profiling and generating Unique Identification for more than 40,000 members in the
Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh.

The UID will link a person's Passport Number, Driving License, PAN card, Bank Accounts,
Address, Voter ID, etc and all this information will be checked through a database. So, for
example, if someone has different addresses on PAN and driving license, is liable to get
caught. Those who will opt out of this program will have much inconvenience in doing
business, operating bank accounts and other offices which will require a UID.
UIDAI has headquarters in Delhi and a technology centre in Bangalore. It also has 6 regional
offices in Chandigarh, Delhi, Lucknow, Ranchi, Guwahati, Mumbai, Hyderabad and
Bangalore.

Name and logo

UID project is known as AADHAAR meaning 'support' or 'foundation', and its logo is a yellow
sun with a fingerprint embedded in its centre.

Format
The ID system is likely to be a large alpha-numeric string in order to accommodate the count
of billion-plus citizens of India and ones that will be born in future. The card is likely to have
a 16kb or 64kb storage chip embedded. Adding a photograph and biometric data would be
planned progressively.

Purpose and use

The ID is fundamentally being prepared to identify Indian citizens so that better security can
be provided by identifying illegal immigrants and terrorists. However, the real power of the
ID is in its ability to provide ease of identity establishment to Indian citizens when accessing
a variety of governmental and private-sector services.

The likely benefits of the new ID system to the citizens will be as below: 1) Subsidies on
food, energy, education, etc to people who are entitled to receive them. 2) Opening bank
accounts 3) Getting new telephone, mobile or internet connections, 4) New light or gas
connections 5) Getting a passport 6) The same card may act as a driving license and store
your traffic violation records 7) It may act as your electoral card 8) Family genealogy may be
traced

Funding
The Government had allocated $22.5 million in the interim Budget to startup this project. The
overall cost estimated for the project is likely to be in the range of $2.2 billion to $4.4 billion.
Implementation
In the first phase, the UID will be issued to people living in the coastal villages of Andhra
Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal, Kerala, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and
Orissa. The Union Territories of Pondicherry, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Dadar and Nagar
Haveli as well as Lakshadweep shall also be covered in the first phase. The first lot of cards is
expected to be delivered by early 2010.

The Aadhaar (UID) number is expected to roll out by February 2011 and finance ministry
officials hope the mandatory use of the UID for the issue of PAN cards in the future would
help curb the proliferation of duplicate PAN cards.

Projected costs and business opportunities

One estimate of the cost to completely roll-out National IDs to all Indian residents above the
age of 18 has been placed at 150,000 crore (US$ 34.05 billion). A different estimate puts it at
US$ 6 billion. A sum of 100 crore (US$ 22.7 million) was approved in the 2009-2010 union
budget to fund the agency for its first year of existence. UID has received a huge boost with
Dr Pranab Mukherjee, Minister of Finance, allocating Rs 1900 crore to the Unique
Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for 2010-11.

Initial estimates project that the initiative will create 1000 new jobs in the country, and
business opportunities worth 6,500 crore (US$ 1.48 billion) in the first phase of
implementation.

Criticism
There are many potential privacy fallouts of this project, not the least of which is triggered by
the Government's official plan to link the databases together.

Although there is sometimes a tension between individual privacy rights and national
security, international law and India’s domestic law expressly set a standard in tort law and
through constitutional law to protect an individual’s privacy from unlawful invasion. Under
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratified by India, an
individual’s right to privacy is protected from arbitrary or unlawful interference by the state.
The Supreme Court also held the right to privacy to be implicit under article 21 of the Indian
Constitution in Rajgopal v. State of Tamil Nadu. Moreover, India has enacted a number of
laws that provide some protection for privacy. For example the Hindu Marriage Act, the
Copyright Act, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 and the Code of
Criminal Procedure all place restrictions on the release of personal information. Privacy is a
key concern with respect to the Multipurpose National Identity Card (MNIC) scheme as all of
an individual’s personal information will be stored in one database where the possibility of
corruption and exploitation of data is far greater than when having the information disbursed.

Risks that arise from this centralization include possible errors in the collection of
information, recording of inaccurate data, corruption of data from anonymous sources, and
unauthorized access to or disclosure of personal information. Other countries with national
identification systems have confronted numerous problems with similar risks such as trading
and selling of information, and India, which has no generally established data protection laws
such as the U.S. Federal Privacy Statute or the European Directive on Data Protection, is ill-
equipped to deal with such problems. The centralized nature of data collection inherent in the
MNIC proposal only heightens the risk of misuse of personal information and therefore
potentially violates privacy rights. In consideration of the risks involved in the creation of a
centralized database of personal information, it is imperative that such a programme not be
established without the proper mechanisms to ensure the security of each individual privacy
rights. Unfortunately, India’s proposed MNIC programme lacks any provision for judicial
review at the present time. Without credible and independent oversight, there is a risk of
‘mission creep’ for MNICs; the government may add features and additional data to the
MNIC database bureaucratically and reflexively, without reevaluating the effects on privacy
in each instance.

Market Analysis
According to the Department of Information Technology:
The Unique Identity Project seeks to assign a Unique Identity (UID) number to each
individual in the country that will remain a permanent identifier right from the individual‘s
birth to death. It offers many benefits:
i. It would obviate the need to produce multiple documentary proofs of identity for availing
any government or private service such as opening of bank accounts. This will end needless
harassment that people face while availing of basic facilities like issuance of passports,
driving licences, electoral identity cards and others.
ii. Backed by intensive use of technology, it would greatly facilitate easy verification of a
person‘s identity and enable a single com-munication to trigger address changes in all
relevant agency records.
iii. It would also serve as the basis for many e-governance initiatives incorporating online
verification of a person‘s identity. UID will enable the government to ensure that benefits
under various welfare programmes (such as PDS, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Right to
Education Bill) reach the intended beneficiaries, prevent cornering of benefits by a few
people and minimise leakages and frauds.
iv. It will also enable financial institutions to exchange information regarding defaulters and
encourage responsible borrower behaviour.
UIDAI will offer multiple levels of authentication and is in the process of building an
economically viable model whereby, depending

Financial Analysis

The costs involved in a project of the size and scale as the UID project are always enormous
and have to be weighed against the limited benefits that are likely to follow. The estimated
costs of implementing the project have not yet been disclosed by the government, while
media reports indicate varying figures. According to information that has trickled out of the
Planning Commission, the estimated initial cost of the project would be anywhere above Rs
20,000 crores (or about 4,348 million US $). Even after the commitment of such levels of
expenditures, the uncertainty over the technological options and ultimate viability of the
scheme remains. Nandan Nilekani himself noted in November 2009 that “no exact estimation
of the savings can be made at this juncture”. In addition, it is unclear whether recurring costs
for maintaining a networked system necessary for ID cards to function effectively have been
accounted for by the government.

Environmental Analysis

If the conditions of life of its citizens are any indicator, India can safely be termed a backward
economy and society. According to a survey of the government’s National Sample Survey
Organization (NSSO) in 2004-05, about 77 per cent of India’s population lived at an average
monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) of Rs 16 per day (or 0.34 US $). The
median number of years of schooling of an average Indian rural woman in 2005-06 was zero.
More than 1 in 18 children in India died within the first year of life, and 1 in 13 children died
before reaching age 5 in 2005-06. Among children under age 3, about 38 per cent were
stunted and about 46 per cent were underweight in 2005-06.

In sum, the extent of reach of basic social services to the Indian population is extremely poor.
Indeed, the role of the state in transforming such backwardness in the life of its citizens is
central. As such, the levels of expenditure of the state as well as efficient implementation of
the state’s welfare programmes have great instrumental value. Social scientists have long
argued that the poor state of governance in India, particularly in areas like poverty alleviation,
demands a closer look at the nature of the Indian state itself. In rural India, where majority of
Indians live, the continuing concentration of political power in the hands of the landed elite is
one of the fundamental barriers to improve the quality of governance. The lack of
implementation of land reforms has aided the continued domination of these landed classes,
also from the upper caste groups, and stymied democratization in the rural areas. According
to John Harriss, “the structure and functioning of ‘local agrarian power’, and the relations of
local and state-level power-holders, do exercise a significant influence on policy processes
and development outcomes” in rural India .

It follows that any effort to comprehensively improve governance has to begin from the
overhauling of local power structures and passing down political power to the under-
privileged sections. Of course, advances in technology can be a major supplement to these
efforts at democratizing the state and society. In certain spheres, technology can play a role in
hastening change as well as reducing the drudgery of manual work. Further, a technology-
based solution works best, and gives the most optimal results, when it is implemented in
societies that are ready to absorb the technology. As Thomas and Parayil argue with respect
to governance, “social structures that tolerate illiteracy, landlessness and other inequities
among large sections of the population deprive the individual of the capabilities to use ICTs
and to benefit from the information that ICTs provide.” However, a perusal of the claims
made in favour of the UID project in India would have us believe that the introduction of
modern technology can help the state bypass fundamental reforms at social transformation.

I argue in this note that the UID project, while being presented as a tool of “good
governance”, would actually lead to the violation of a large number of freedoms of Indian
people. No amount of assertion vis-à-vis improved service delivery can justify the violation
of citizen’s freedoms and liberties. Next, I argue that there is a misplaced emphasis on the
benefits of technology in this project, when the robustness of that technology to handle large
populations remains largely unproven. Further, I argue that no detailed cost-benefit analysis
of the project has been carried out yet. Finally, I try to show, with an illustration, that the
roots of inefficiency in public welfare schemes in India do not lie in the absence of identity
proofs. In arguing all the above, I have used the literature on the experiences of more modern
nations of the world in providing people with unique ID cards.

CONTRACTS
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has selected three Biometric Solution
agencies and awarded contract to consortiums led by M/s Accenture, Mahindra
Satyam~Morpho and L1 Identity Solutions to implement the core biometric identification
system in for the “Aadhaar” programme.

The goal of the programme is to provide each Indian resident with a unique identification
number – Aadhaar, and enable easier, more efficient and secure access to welfare schemes.
The programme is designed to confirm the identity of the 1.2 billion residents of India,
making it the largest identity management programme in the world. The initial phase of the
contract will run up to two years and a total of 200 million residents are expected to be de-
duplicated by a combination of the three Biometric Solution Agencies in the first stage of the
program. The entire selection process was completed in record time of three months and
many new international benchmarks, including one of the lowest prices for deduplication
have been achieved. The multi modal system and allocation of de-duplication transactions
among the three agencies based on the performance of each system is being attempted for the
first time in identity resolution systems anywhere.

The scope of work for the Biometrics Solution Providers will, inter-alia, include the design,
supply, installation, commissioning, maintenance and support of multi-modal Automatic
Biometric Identification Subsystem (ABIS) and multi-modal Software Development Kit
(SDK) for client enrollment station, verification server, manual adjudication and monitoring
function of the UID application. These functions would go into creating the ability of UIDAI
to ensure Deduplication during the allotment of UID numbers based on the Biometric
information collected from the residents. The selection of Biometric solution vendors is a
major milestone in the UID project.