Nilekani Aadhaar created global buzz

UIDAI helps Papua New Guinea to have similar identity programme.

Updated on: Feb 16, 2012, 15:17:40 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan

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Nandan Nilekani’s unique identification project is yet to take-off fully in India but it has created an international buzz.

Countries from across the globe have shown interest in the project now world’s largest biometric database of 13 crore people as against 11.4 crore of US’s immigration department. But, only four crore Indians have got their Aadhaar numbers because of postal department’s constraints in its dispatch.

R S Sharma, director-general of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) said collecting biometric details of over a billion people for just three US dollars (Rs 150) per person is unimaginable for many. Biometric collection of residents in United Kingdom costed 130 Euro (Rs 8,500) per person.

“The magnitude and its flawlessness have caught their attention. They now say biometric collection has three phases. Pre 9/11 (terror strike in US), post 9/11 and post UIDAI,” Sharma, an Indian Administrative Service official and a pass-out of IIT Kanpur in 1976, told HT.

The UIDAI is a government body mandated with the task of assigning a 12 digit unique number to every India resident over five years of age by mid of 2013. Biometric details of half of India’s population will be enrolled by UIDAI and rest by Home Ministry’s National Population Register (NPR)

The global fervor has also translated into action.

The UIDAI is assisting the government of Papua New Guinea, a small island nation in Pacific Ocean close to Australia, to establish a national identity scheme.

Two UIDAI officials, B B Nanawati, deputy director general and Anup Kumar, additional director general, spent a week in the island nation in this January to guide the country’s national government to provide biometric identity to its seven million residents living in hundreds of islands. The UIDAI has enrolled a million people in India every day.

The authority had also provided inputs to another island nation Mauritius in the Indian Ocean on enrolment for getting unique identification number (UID) or an Aadhaar and advised Australia on how to unique number can help in tracking migration.

The UIDAI had also made presentation on India’s modern development initiative to government functionaries from Indonesia, France and Columbia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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