A World Bank study released earlier this year enumerated the rot in Indian welfare programmes. About 91% of subsidised grain meant for the poor in Bihar never reached them. Only 32-51 % of the pensions for the elderly, destitute, widows and the disabled reached them.The facts above demand bold action and India has begun an unprecedented effort to create a biometric ID for everyone. Providing a legitimate legal ID for everyone is a necessary condition for a modern society but, in itself, it is not sufficient to deliver the higher standards of living and social mobility Indians deserve. Creating the ID simply makes addressing other, second-order challenges possible.
India is starting to encounter and confront some of these second-order challenges such as:
♦ How to offer universal access to banking services
♦ How to tie ID, banking and government services together
♦ How to harmonize operations among different identity management, government and financial organizations
The linked article comes off as a laundry list of gripes but perhaps it should be read in a positive light. As long as there are new Indians entering the world, the UID project will never be complete. But even after the UIDAI completes the enrollment process for all currently-living Indians, India will still have a long way to go to realize its own vision of what it can become. Without UID, it can't even begin the journey.
As technologically, logistically, politically and organizationally challenging as the UID project is, it's the easy part. It makes tackling even harder problems possible.
The fact that UID is bringing other, even bigger problems into focus is a symptom of the program's success.
UPDATE: via @M2SYS & @Allevate
Amol Sharma of The Wall Street journal has an interesting complement to the above article that provides some great numerical context for the UID project.
UID Behind Schedule, But Cash Isn’t Why (Wall Street Journal)
Still, there are some positive signs of progress lately. In July, 7.8 million people were enrolled; that accelerated to 12.9 million in August, or about 416,000 people per day. The challenge is to pick up the pace slightly and then sustain it for a long time. To reach the project’s next big target of signing up 600 million people by the end of 2014 Mr. Nilekani’s team will need to enroll closer to a half million people every day, on average.
