In today's episode of "All UID, All the Time," India's Home Minister Chidambaram announces that "There were media reports about conflict between the home ministry and the UIDAI, but they are not true," and “There is no clash between Adhaar and the smart card issued by the Home Ministry.”
[You may take a moment to retrieve your monocle.]
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.
