Unique identity number game

BRP Bhaskar

The Indian government has decided to expand the scope of its ambitious programme to give each citizen a unique identity number, ignoring concerns voiced by civil society groups who fear misuse of the data gathered by the authorities.

The 12-digit number is generated using a code, named Aadhar, and the individual’s identity is established by a combination of biometric data such as fingerprint and retina scan. The person will be given a letter with the number on it. Verification of identity will be done online.

So far more than 120 million people have been given UID numbers under the programme launched in 2010. By March end, 200 million are expected to be covered.

The programme is being implemented by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDIA), headed by Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of the IT services major Infosys.

At a high level meeting, the government last week sorted out the differences between UIDIA and the Home Ministry which had cast a shadow over the programme.

The Home Ministry had felt that UIDIA was covering the same ground as the Census department which was preparing the National Population Register.

Under the formula agreed upon at the high level meeting, UIDIA will gather data in respect of 600 million people. To avoid duplication, UIDIA and the Census department will share the biometric data they collect.

As happens so often with government schemes in the country, the UID project is fast outstripping the cost estimates. Expenses for five years, originally estimated at Rs 32 billion, are now set to exceed Rs 88 billion. Officials are, however, unperturbed. They assert that the programme will yield substantial savings to the government by plugging the loopholes in the delivery of various services.

The government spends about Rs 3,000 billion a year on food and other subsidies and payment of wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. A big chunk of the money goes into the pockets of middlemen. Once the beneficiaries of the schemes get UID numbers, all payments will be made directly to them, eliminating the middlemen.

A pilot project for direct distribution of NREG wages through an Aadhar enabled payment system has already been introduced in some parts of Jharkhand state.

While UID does not provide for profiling, critics say it will be possible for the authorities to create profiles by accessing the information stored at different locations. They argue that even if there is no invasion of privacy the project is unacceptable as it vests the state with awesome power over the citizens. They believe the UID project is a national security programme camouflaged as one meant for efficient delivery of service.

The government is proceeding with the UID programme without a legal framework. The National Identification Authority of India Bill it brought forward in 2010 was rejected by Parliament’s Standing Committee, which found it defective. The committee asked the government to come up with a new draft after reviewing the working of the Aadhar project but this has not been done.

Supporters of the project allege that politicians ganged up against the measure as it will minimise their role in the distribution of benefits under various government schemes.

In the absence of statutory backing, UIDIA is going ahead with the number game on the strength of an executive order issued by the Planning Ministry.

The law which governs the decennial census operations enjoins upon the state to protect the privacy of the people. It is, therefore, not possible to use census data for other purposes. To overcome this limitation, the government assumed the power to gather information for preparing a population register by getting Parliament to amend the Citizenship Act.

The National Population Register is an expanded version of a scheme prepared by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government, which was in power from 1998 to 2004, to issue multipurpose national identity cards to residents of border areas with a view to checking infiltration.

UID numbers are allotted on the basis of information provided by applicants at designated data collection centres.

Doubts raised by critics about the reliability of the data gathered in this manner remain uncleared. A sting operation conducted by a Hindi television channel showed that it is easy to establish false identities as there is no mechanism for proper verification of information provided by the applicants. - Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 30, 2012

Missing girls cause no alarm

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Studies have revealed that girls are disappearing from India’s population at an increasing rate. However, there is no firm societal or governmental action to check the trend.

First reports based on the 2011 Census, which became available three months ago, showed that the sex ratio in the 0-6 age group had dropped from 927 girls for every 1,000 boys in 2001 to 914, the lowest since the country gained freedom in 1947.

There were about 7.1 million fewer girls than boys in that age group. At the time of the 2001 Census the gap was only 6.0 million.

In 1961 there were 976 girls for every 1,000 boys. Since then the sex ratio has been falling continuously in India although in the world as a whole it has been rising. In the global population there are now 1,050 girls for every 1,000 boys.

Noted economist Amartya Sen, one of the first to notice the trend, attributed it to neglect of the girl child, leading to early mortality and consequent fall in the female population. He noted that this happened in other Asian countries, including China, also.

In a 1990 article, Sen said an estimated 100 million women were missing from the world population tables. He later calculated that India’s missing women might number 37 million. The United Nations, in 2001, suggested a higher figure of 44 million.

Researchers have established a link between the fall in the sex ratio among children and the technological advances that have made it possible to determine the sex of the unborn child and eliminate the ‘unwanted’ female.

Ultrasound equipment that permits determination of the sex of the foetus became available in the 1970s. Within a decade they were in wide use all over the country and laboratories started advertising the facility.

As parents’ marked preference for male progeny resulted in large-scale female foeticide, Amartya Sen observed that there had been a shift from ‘mortality inequality’ to ‘natality inequality’

The overall sex ratio in India is 940 females for every 1,000 males. Thanks to the comparatively better status women enjoyed under the matrilineal system which prevailed until a century ago, Kerala has always recorded a favourable sex ratio. It now stands at 1,084 females against 1,000 males as against 1,038 females in 2001.

However, Kerala, too, is on the slippery path. In the 0-6 age group, the sex ratio in the state was only 962 females for 1,000 males in 2001. Now it has fallen to 959 females for 1,000 males.

A recent study which analysed census data and 250,000 birth histories from national surveys has shown that where the first born is a girl there is an increasing tendency to abort the second child if that too happens to be a girl. Even wealthy and educated families are inclined to do this.

Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto, who was involved in the study, says most of India’s population live in states where sex selective abortion is common. Gender imbalance, he adds, has travelled from the traditional hotspots in the north to the east and the south.

Many communities consider a girl a liability as a hefty dowry may be needed to marry her off. However, the prevalence of female foeticide even among the affluent sections indicates that preference for son stems primarily from social and religious factors. Most Hindus believe a son has to perform the funeral rites to ensure their smooth passage to heaven.

The central government’s effort to promote gender equality is confined largely to publicity campaigns, whose effects are offset by the regular fare of the media which tends to reinforce traditional beliefs.

The state governments are too timid to challenge the orthodox elements, and non-governmental organisations working in the area of gender justice are too few and too weak to make an impact.

In a rare display of will to act, the Maharashtra government last month cracked down on sex determination clinics and shut down 131 of them. With the help of a decoy customer, the police arrested three doctors who offered to abort female foetus for a small fee.

It is not possible to place much faith in such sporadic campaigns. Over the past three years the state registered cases against more than 150 persons in connection with cases of illegal pregnancy termination but there have been only four convictions so far. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, July 4, 2011

Counting the numbers

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The massive operation of counting the people of India enters the final phase this week when 2.7 million trained personnel will spread across the country to enumerate all those whom they can find. Census operations have been a regular decennial exercise since late 19th century. Rising population has made every census a bigger undertaking than the previous one.

China and India are the only countries with populations in excess of one billion. China crossed the one billion mark in 1980. India followed 19 years later. Currently China’s population is estimated at more than 1.3 billion and India’s at close to 1.2 billion. Demographers say there is little possibility of any other country entering the Billion Club.-- ulGf Today, Sharjah, February 7, 2011.

A few years ago the UN Population Division estimated that by 2016 India will have a population of 1.22 billion, which will be larger than the combined population of the countries of Europe including Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and the United States.

It also said that by 2045 India, with a population of 1.501 billion, will replace China, with a population of 1.496 billion, as the most populous country.

The British Indian authorities scheduled the first census in the subcontinent for 1871 but it materialised only in the following year. Since 1881 census operations have taken place every 10 years.

Departing from the practice at home, the British included in the Indian census data on race, religion and caste presumably to fine-tune their divide-and-rule policy. Early in the 20th century, one U.N. Mukherji of Kolkata, citing census figures, claimed Hindus would be swallowed up by others in about 420 years. The fear that he kindled still animates Hindu communalism.

The census data helped the socially backward sections to understand their plight and demand justice. By the 1930s, progressive princely states like Kolhapur, Mysore, Travancore and Baroda and British-ruled Madras Presidency introduced reservation in the services and in educational institutions for them.

In 1941, the colonial administration, under the influence of the dominant castes already well entrenched in the bureaucracy, decided to stop collection of caste data. However, at the instance of an organisation of the Maithili Brahmins of Bihar, it gathered data about that community that year for a small fee.

The Constitution, as amended in 1951, empowers the government to make special provisions for advancement of socially and educationally backward classes. Absence of reliable caste data has hindered identification of groups which need such provisions. Conceding demands by some political parties and social organisations, the government has agreed to gather caste data this year. This will be done separately between June and September, after the census operations are completed.

Work on the 2011 census began on April 1 last year. By September, the enumerators completed listing of houses in all but some villages under the control of Maoist rebels. An attempt will be made soon to go into those villages too.

This time, besides counting all people in the territory of India and classifying them on the basis of gender, religion, occupation and education, the enumerators will gather data on a number of other subjects. These will include personal particulars like nationality and whether they have bank accounts and cell phones and whether they use the Internet.

On the basis of the data the government will prepare a National Population Register which will contain photographs and fingerprints of all persons. It will be sent to the Unique Identification Authority of India which has been authorised to generate a Unique Identity (UID) for each resident of India who has completed 18 years and issue a smart card.

The UID project, estimated to cost about Rs1,500 billion, has been entrusted to an independent authority headed by information technology expert Nandan Nilekani.

The government claims the data bank will help draw up focussed development plans. However, a section of civil society views it as an intrusion into civil liberties and has mounted a campaign against it.

“Let us not be naïve,” Jean Drèze, development economist with special interest in issues like hunger, rural employment and gender inequality, said recently. “This is not a social policy initiative. It is a national security project.”

Critics point out that India, which has no reliable data protection law, is not equipped to deal with problems like trading and selling of information which other countries with national identification systems have faced.

Bringing Orwell’s Big Brother to life

In an editorial page article in today’s issue of The Hindu, Usha Ramanathan, a researcher working on the jurisprudence of law, poverty and rights, discusses the implications of registering, tracking and profiling in the context of the government’s decision to gather data for the National Population Register along with the 2011 Census exercise, which has just got under way.

She points out that information collected under the Census Act is confidential. Information needed for NPR is being collected under the Citizenship Act and rules framed under it, which do not have a confidentiality clause. In fact, this information will be readily available to a number of investigative agencies under the control of the Central government.

While the Census creates a profile of the population, NPR creates profiles of individuals. “This,” she says, “will bring Orwell’s Big Brother back to life; we are asked to accept that each of us be treated as potential terrorists and security threats, for that is the logic on which this tracking and profiling of the individual is based.”

See text of article: Implications of registering, tracking and profiling

The fears expressed by Usha Ramanathan may be examined in the light of the actual experience social and political activists narrated at a conference on Media and Law organized by the Human Law Network in New Delhi on Sunday.

See The Hindu report of the conference: Downloading a document from the Internet can land you in jail

Freeze of States' seats in Lok Sabha into next century mooted

WILL the Lok Sabha be truly representative of the people of India in the 22nd century? Or will we have sacrificed the principle of allocating seats among the States on the basis of population by then to protect the gains on the population front?

Kerala now has an estimated population of 33 million. If birth and death rates remain unchanged, by 2101 the State’s population will shrink to 28 million, according to a recent population forecast, says Dr. M. Vijayanunni, a former IAS officer, who had served as India’s Registrar General and Census Commissioner, in an article in the Malayalam daily Kerala Kaumudi.

By then, he adds, India’s population, which was 1.03 billion in 2001, would have shot up to 2.18 billion. Tamil Nadu will be the only other State to have registered a population decline – from 62 million in 2001 to 58 million. The population of the northern States would have increased considerably: by 323% in Bihar, 298% in Rajasthan, 289% in Uttar Pradesh, 242% in Madhya Pradesh and 239% in Delhi. Together these five States will have as many people as there are in the whole of India today.

Dr. Vijayanunni points out that if the Lok Sabha’s composition is readjusted on the basis of population, the ten Hindi States’ share will go up from 226 seats to 321 and the non-Hindi States’ will go down from 317 to 222. Kerala’s representation will decline from 20 to seven. In the circumstances, he says, it may become necessary to continue the Constitutional amendment that freezes States’ representation in the Lok Sabha on the basis of the 1971 Census.

Originally, Article 82 of the Constitution provided that, upon the completion of each census, allocation of seats in the Lok Sabha to the States and the division of each State into territorial constituencies shall be readjusted by such authority and in such manner as Parliament may by law determine. In keeping with this provision, the Centre appointed a Delimitation Commission after the 1951, 1961 and 1971 Census operations.

In 1976, Parliament, by a constitutional amendment, put the delimitation process in abeyance until the first census after 2000. This was done to protect the interests of States like Kerala, which were making strenuous efforts to control the growth of population.

When the time came for delimitation on the basis of the 2001 Census figures, Parliament made two more amendments to the Constitution. The cumulative effect of these amendments is that there will be fresh delimitation but seat allocation to the States will still be on the basis of the 1971 Census until the first census after the year 2026.

Thus there is already a national commitment to retain the present pattern of distribution of Lok Sabha seats until after the 2031 Census. Its continuance into the next century means virtual abandonment of the principle of representation on the basis of population.