In the last
few weeks Aadhar or UID project is under lots of scrutiny. The question today
is “to be or not to be” a part of this process. Although I am not a big fan of Aadhar
card but some where I feel it’s very important to have a UID number allocated
to all legitimate citizen of India.
Let’s look
at this from technical perspective. We need to have a centralized database for
citizen of India and UID will be the primary key of that database. So the
question is what will happen to PAN Card, Voters Id card, Passport etc? The
secondary question is how this UID can be linked with other services used by
the citizen like telephone, internet, cooking gas etc?
The solutions to these questions can be arrived by a two step process:
1) Existing Citizens
The government
should first create a web site(secured) where people can voluntarily declare their
PAN/PASSPORT/VOTER CARD details through online registration. For rural sector
they can do the same through BDO offices and Panchayats. Once these data is
filled then government should verify the data(along with citizenship authentication) and issue an UID to the user(online).
Once this
is done the user can declare his birth certificate number/ marriage
registration / phone / bank / cooking gas details in the same site. Since every
facility is attached with identification document which is collected by the
service provider so the government can ask the service provider to link those
accounts with this UID.
Thus at the
end of the process all the physical entities will become attached with UID of
the person. Off course this will require verification and validation but
atleast most documents would become traceable.
The last
step should be voluntary collection of biometrics and adding them against this
UID. This process should take huge time considering the population of India.
2) New Citizens
The
government should ensure that all person born after a certain date should get
an UID along with birth certificate so that when the person grows up all his
documents can automatically be linked to his UID.This will
ensure that after 50 years or so all Indian citizen will be covered under UID. This will also solve the citizenship issue.
The simplified case study diagram should look
like this. Although in real life it will be more complex matrix.
This is a simplified solution to a big problem. Data collation and data mining will be a huge part of this project but then again if there is a will then there is always away out. This process will take time but will ensure that all of us have UID and we become accountable.
