We don't have to wait for the entire population to get enrolled with Aadhaar: R S Sharma

Interview with DG, UIDAI

After undertaking a massive enrolment drive and testing out processes in pilot projects nationwide, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) would have to deliver an Aadhaar platform at scale, starting January 1. While it’s not going to be an impossible task, UIDAI’s Director General and Mission Director R S Sharma tells Devjyot Ghoshal that significant challenges remain. Edited excerpts:

In 2013, Aadhaar will be tested out at scale, after a series of pilot projects, with the national rollout. What will change within UIDAI starting January 1?
Our focus is going to shift to ensuring that all the beneficiaries of these programmes have the Aadhaar number. We have started a targeted enrolment of beneficiaries. We are putting up camps in 43 districts, as of now, where we will conduct campaigns to bring everybody who is a beneficiary of these 34 schemes to come and get themselves enrolled. We are also putting in place an accelerated process of generating Aadhaar for these people, which will include priority processing of (data) packets from these 43 districts.

How quickly can an Aadhaar be generated and delivered for a user with these new processes in place?
About seven days from the point of uploading of the enrolment data. Suppose you enrol today and the data gets uploaded to the data centre in the evening, within seven days we assure you that Aadhaar will be generated and then, as soon as it is generated, the next moment you can download it (and print it). Of course, the receipt of the Aadhaar letter might take more time, as it comes to you by post.

After the initial 51 districts, the road map put out by the Prime Minister’s Office says the rollout will happen in 18 states starting April 1. Are you concerned about the speed of the proposed rollout?
We think it is doable from UIDAI’s perspective. If we ensure the beneficiaries of those schemes that have been taken up for rollout get enrolled and get Aadhaar, then we are good to go. We don’t have to wait for the entire population to get enrolled.

To give you an idea, the total number of beneficiaries in these 34 schemes (across 43 districts) is not more than a million. That’s my sense. Now, we have about 3,500 machines working in these districts currently and each has a capacity of around 50 enrolments per day. If we align them to only enroll these beneficiaries, we can enroll 150,000 beneficiaries every day. Enrolment capacity is not an issue.

The database of the beneficiaries of selected schemes will have to be seeded with Aadhaar numbers. But the quality of these databases is not the same. Is this a worry?
The issue is that various programmes have various stages of automation and digitisation. As an example, MGNREGS may have complete data available online but there may be many programmes that have a manual list of beneficiaries. The direct cash transfer won’t have to wait for the entire process to be re-engineered. So long as the beneficiary domain has a digitised list of beneficiaries and is able to seed the Aadhaar numbers into their databases, they will be able to generate the Aadhaar Payment Bridge file to provide payment instructions to the banks.

A large numbers of beneficiary accounts for government schemes are with post offices. How are you going to deal with this, since India Post doesn’t have a core banking solution yet?
Recently, we have started working with them to figure out as to whether we can put in place some intermediate solutions quickly, so that various departments are able to push money using the Aadhaar payment bridge into the accounts and then there is an easy delivery system, using micro ATMs.

What are going to be the three main challenges for the UIDAI with the nationwide rollout?
The first challenge is to ensure enrolment of beneficiaries. The second is to ensure the authentication platform must not fail. It has to be 24x7, instantaneous and real time. Operationally, the system should not break down. Also, there should not be any bugs or glitches in the system.

The third challenge is that we should build, with every delivery system that uses Aadhaar authentication for service delivery, an exception management system, so that Aadhaar authentication failure (for whatever reasons) doesn’t become an excuse for denial of service to the people.