This has been a long time coming.
Borrowing heavily from an earlier post, UID Catch-22:
♦ India's bureaucracies aren't able to serve the needs of Indians because of an accountability black hole.
♦ A more rigorous ID scheme will increase accountability and deliver better results to citizens.
♦ Implementing the ID scheme depends on the bureaucracies (see statement 1).
Thankfully, the last statement isn't quite true. If true, it dooms the UID project on the bases of both bureaucratic will and ability. There must be many bureaucrats invested in the status quo that would love to see the UID project fail, and the UID load will be difficult for some bureaucracies to bear.
If you didn't click through yet, the above-linked article informs readers that the post office is currently falling short on its responsibility to print and deliver UID numbers.
But if the post office was a model of efficiency, might that call into question the whole reason for UID in the first place?
While UIDAI has allotted Aadhaar identities to 130 million residents, only around 50 million have received letters sent by the authority through India Post informing them about their 12-digit unique identification numbers. The letters have been mailed since the the first set of Aadhaar numbers were issued in September 2010. Some 450,000 letters have been returned to UIDAI.I suspect that none of these contingency plans were made up on the fly*. UIDAI knew it would have to use the post office and knew it would fail. There probably isn't a private entity in India that can displace the post office entirely, but competition among government entities is better than no competition at all and UID is also entering that competition directly by communicating numbers directly to individuals who have access to the internet.
...
The job of printing the letters has already been taken away from the agency which, according to its website, is the world’s largest postal network with 155,015 post offices as on 31 March 2009. Three private sector firms were given the printing job in January-end after India Post wasn’t able to take the load.
In the final accounting, UID is not about biometrics. Biometrics is a means to better ID management. Better ID management is a means to bring greater transparency and accountability to nearly every aspect of how the government goes about its allocated tasks. Is it any wonder it has so many enemies?
Identity management is about people; the challenges of UID are and will be as much managerial as technical.
*Just having the right technology is not sufficient to roll out a project on this scale. “What we need to do is create an appropriate ecosystem,” said Nilekani. In short, getting the incentives right for all those involved in the project."
See also:
The epic marketing challenge for UID
India: Is UID Under Siege?
