Another ID card?

One nation, one card proposal raises many questions

Barely has the dust settled on the massive unique identification project, otherwise known as Aadhaar, than Union Home Minister Amit Shah raised another source of anxiety of Indians with his proposal to introduce a “one nation, one card” plan. This new card, he said at an event of the Registrar General of India (which conducts the 10-year census), would “link all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, bank account, driving licence, voter card”. The data for this exercise would be part of the National Population Register (NPR) exercise, to be collected alongside the 2021 census, which collects all data on “usual residents” of India (that is, who have resided in a local area for the past six months and intend to reside there for the next six months).

The NPR exercise — which began in 2011 at a cost of Rs 10,000 crore under P Chidambaram and famously clashed with the Aadhaar authority on whose database would prevail (the latter won out) — would collect the Aadhaar number, the Permanent Account Number, the voter ID, and passport information. Sharing the Aadhaar number would be voluntary in view of the Supreme Court’s judgment last year. All this data will not be in the public domain but accessible to a citizen through a password-protected protocol.

On paper, the one nation, one card and NPR proposals, which may or may not be linked (the home ministry did not clarify), have the logic of simplicity. It will relieve the Indian citizen of being loaded with multiple cards that act as identity documents — most middle-class Indians have at least four. But the initiative raises more questions. First, it is unclear why the government would feel the need to subject India’s citizenry to another identification drive when over 90 per cent of them are covered by Aadhaar, which was an elaborate, time-consuming exercise. Second, the census does not cover the entire population, which leaves unanswered the questions of the status of those citizens who are not visited by a census officer. Third, where does this leave migrant labour, who may well be citizens but would not qualify as “usual residents”? Fourth, the old apprehensions about data privacy apply here too. The Supreme Court’s Aadhaar judgement a year ago had directed the government to introduce a “robust” data privacy law even as it upheld the constitutional validity of the exercise. This is nowhere in evidence, and remains a concern. The issue is: When there is a single card that holds all vital details, what happens when the system is compromised? There are also very few solutions in the event of data breaches, and the one card idea magnifies this danger.

Fifth, in March this year, the prime minister launched a “one card, one nation” mobility card — which also had its origins in the United Progressive Alliance — via the RuPay platform for making payments across all transport segments including metro, bus, suburban railways, smart cities and retail shopping, for paying at toll plazas and for parking. This National Common Mobility Card, which certainly has greater utility than an all-inclusive citizenship card, has been adopted by some local transport networks (in Mumbai and Telangana), but it has been stymied by the lack of all-India connectivity. The “one nation, one card” plan could well suffer from similar infirmities.