UIDAI takes on parl panel on Aadhaar project

Taking a Parliamentary committee head-on, Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has asked a Cabinet committee to reject its recommendations on the project saying it was not based on facts. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 21, 2012, 22:41:16 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Taking a Parliamentary committee head-on, Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has asked a Cabinet committee to reject its recommendations on the project saying it was not based on facts.

A parliamentary standing committee headed by BJP leader and former finance minister Yashwant Sinha in last December had asked the government to stop the unique identification project and rejected a draft bill to provide legal backing to UIDAI.

In a stern rejoinder, the UIDAI has reportedly said the committee’s projection that providing unique identification number to each citizen will cost around Rs 1.5 lakh crore was incorrect and highly exaggerated. The UIDAI project would cost Rs 18,000 crore to the government.

"The parliamentary committee failed to cross check the basic facts from us before putting them in the report," a senior government official, requesting anonymity said. “The report did not say on what basis they reached the figure”.

The parliamentary panel first asked the UIDAI to make a presentation after which civil society activists such as Usha Ramanathan, an independent legal researcher and Gopal Krishna of NGO toxicwatch presented the case against Uid.

What has irked the UIDAI was the fact that the Parliamentary committee never called them to give their view regarding claims made by activists. "The entire report has their activist version,” an official said.

The UIDAI was also amazed to find the committee did not deliberate much on the draft bill, its mandate, and instead, presented recommendations on the government's policy to provide a 12 digit unique number to each resident of India.

Sinha's committee, in fact, said the government should give UID only to Indian citizens and not all residents as decided by the government. The committee also raised the privacy issues and safety of data regarding each Indian resident.

The UIDAI, through the Planning Commission, has finalised a proposal for the Cabinet Committee on UID seeking rejection of most the recommendations of the parliamentary committee.

The cabinet committee is also likely to seek approval for the draft bill, which proposes setting up of national unique identification authority of India.

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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