The only good idea

Government slowness may have scuttled Aadhaar

With the declaration that the chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani, will stand as a Congress candidate in the coming Lok Sabha elections from a constituency in Bangalore, attention has once again been focused on the Aadhaar project. Aadhaar is almost at its target of enrolling 600 million people nationwide; Mr Nilekani says that the UIDAI has now got the mandate to enrol people in four more states, which means it should take the number up to 950 million by 2015, if all goes well. All may not go well, however; the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) national spokesperson, Meenakshi Lekhi, said recently that Aadhaar was "a fraud", that biometric data were being sent "outside the country", threatened a Central Bureau of Investigation probe of all the money spent on Aadhaar, and said the BJP would review the entire project, which it suspects was entered into only to grant Bangladeshi migrants Indian citizenship. In other words, Mr Nilekani's candidature has made Aadhaar a deeply partisan issue.

Mr Nilekani himself reportedly told crowds while campaigning: "WhatsApp gained 450 million users in five years, while Aadhaar got 600 million users in just 4.5 years." The problem with the Aadhaar project can, in fact, be highlighted through just that statement. WhatsApp gained users because it was useful, and people wanted to download and use it. Aadhaar, sadly, cannot be said to have "users" yet. There are as yet few uses. This is why Mr Nilekani has to emphasise the number of enrolments, not the benefits that flow from Aadhaar - because those exist today only in theory. And the simple fact is that enrolments should not be seen as a sign of success. The roll-out of working Aadhaar-linked programmes should be - because, after all, cost savings and user-friendliness were the supposed rationale for the UID project.

However, since January 2013, when the government announced a speeded-up timetable for Aadhaar-linked programmes, it has had to retreat on its ambition. The number of programmes that were being tried and the number of districts they were being tried in were both whittled down. Political pressure from the Congress party, including from Rahul Gandhi, led to the one place that Aadhaar looked like making a difference, the household liquefied petroleum gas subsidy, being in essence withdrawn.

None of this is, of course, Mr Nilekani's fault. The blame belongs to the rest of the government. Many in government actively blocked the UID project in the early years; others were passive. Like much else in this government's tenure, the lack of co-ordination and co-operation between ministries led to the stalling of a good idea. Meanwhile, the government's inability to pass a suitable law in Parliament - in particular following an ill-judged and backward-looking attack on the UID project from the standing committee chaired by Yashwant Sinha - allowed the Supreme Court to repeatedly order the Aadhaar programme to be scaled down. Concerns over privacy issues also have not been adequately addressed. It, therefore, would be unfortunate if one of the only transformational ideas of this government is a casualty of its slowness and inefficiency, or of the BJP's desire to play politics. But that, at least, is what it seems might happen now.