The tIDe Turns In UK; Will UID/Aadhar Meet The Same Fate?
By Binu Karunakaran
30 May, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Some less than 100 days from now the coalition government in UK will scrap its controversial £4.5bn national identity card scheme and save its citizens from both unwanted privacy intrusions and loss of valuable tax payers money. By the end of the same time period in August this year another coalition government, the Manmohan Singh-led UPA in India, would start stamping its citizens with an UID number.
It took six hard years of campaigning by groups like NO2ID to force the government to bring in a legislation that will scrap not only the ID card scheme, but the National Identity Register and the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint database.The Cameron government has also promised to outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission, secure the DNA database following a Scottish model and end storage of internet and email records without good reason.
With the tremours from Athens signalling an impending debt quake in Europe, the decision to scrap the ID scheme seem to be timely. Hopefully the money Cameron government saves will come handy when shoring up its own economy. According to a Guardian report the move will save £86 mn over four years and avoid £800 mn in costs over the next 10 years. This estimation is after discounting the prospect of increased charges. The decision to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports will save a further £134 mn over four years. The total savings by UK tax payers will be £1 bn.
A team at London School of Economics (from where our own economist Prime Minister graduated) which has been closely monitoring the project warmly endorsed the decision "to finally scrap this ineffective, misinformed and expensive folly", saying the scheme has been lurching from redesign to redesign, from one claimed purpose to another over the past five years.
The LSE Identity Project, managed by the Information Systems and Innovation group under the Department of Management had warned as early as in 2005 that the UK government estimation was flawed and the Identity cards could cost £18bn over 10 years. Mind it, the LSE group was not a den of refusenik activists, but purely an academic research and monitoring endevvour. The official estimate for UK national ID card was £30.
The various cost estimations available for the "Aadhar" project looks unrealistic when you compare the demographics of UK and India, the economics of scale not withstanding. UK has a population of 62 million, India a staggering 1.2 billion. One estimate puts the Aadhar cost at Rs 1.5 lakh crore (US$ 33.45 billion) for 18+ population. With the UIDAI planning to provide Aadhar numbers for all residents above the age of five, the figure is all set to go up. The other conservative estimate of $2.2-$4.4 billion looks laughably tame.
The UIDAI is responsible only for rollout of Aadhar numbers. The cost of various smart card applications that would run on UID/Aadhar does not seem to have been integrated. The HCL recently bagged Rs 600 crore project for developing smart card application for the PDS in Madhya Pradesh.
Will our Prime Minister who is an illustrious alumni of the LSE ask his London alma mater or the Delhi School of Economics, where he taught, to objectively look into Nandan Nilekani's Aadhar boondoggle? India surely deserves better.
