The planning commission on Friday said that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) issue has been resolved. The cabinet committee on UIDAI has also approved additional spending of Rs 5,000 crore for issuing UID cards.P Chidambaram, Nandan Nilekani call truce on Aadhaar (Economic Times)
The Union Cabinet on Friday decided to extend UIDAI's mandate for collecting biometrics from 20 crore citizens to 60 crore citizens, thus ending a year long turf war between the Unique ID Authority of India Chairman Nandan Nilekani and Home Minister P Chidambaram over the mandate to collect data of Indian residents.♦ UID had its mandate tripled and is to issue ID's to 600 million people.
♦ Both sides agreed to stay our of each other's way (though simple arithmetic would seem to render that impossible over the long run).
♦ UID has to make some adjustments to how NPR wants to collect the data.
I have a feeling that the rivalry between the two projects and the two men that head them will heat up again soon enough.
I think this post from Tuesday had it about right.
It looks like Chidambaram was either told in no uncertain terms to start playing nice, or was tipped off ahead of Wednesday's cabinet meeting that UID was going ahead and he figured out which way the wind was blowing on his own (See: Govt likely to extend UIDAI’s ambit). The Home Ministry is now "examining how best to include the Adhaar number into the [Home Ministry's] smart card, which will make the smart card even more feature rich." This is a good thing.
While it is inherently inefficient to have two government bureaucracies with broadly overlapping mandates, India's experience with monolithic bureaucracies that face no competition hasn't been good, either (See: UID Catch-22).
There are also some synergies between the two efforts. They can learn from each other during the massive multi-year organizational effort. The UID database can be used to audit the NPR database and vice versa. Eventually they may be combined.
It's easy to understand Home Minister Chidambaram's point of view. Unlike UID's Nandan Nilakeni, Chidambaram is a real government minister, with a big job and the power (and budget) that goes with it. It must be horribly inconvenient for a government minister to have to compete with India's most famous technology business titan especially when he gets to start from scratch and you have to steer an organizational culture you didn't create and have few mechanisms to change.
His best arguments for clipping Nilakeni's wings were always legal and procedural: UID wasn't created the right way; Parliament hadn't acted; etc. His tactics were counterproductive when he argued his case from a technical position because his technical criticisms (accuracy, fraud, etc.) consisted entirely of pointing out challenges inherent in any biometric project of this scale. They applied to UID and the NPR equally.
Hopefully this signals the end of the beginning of the creation of a key piece of 21st century Indian infrastructure.
If the two organizations can work together for the common good there will be plenty of credit to go around.
To which I would add that Indians can also benefit from a healthy rivalry between the two.
