Cabinet to decide Aadhar fate next week

Union Home Ministry and Planning Commission are at loggerheads over it

The fate of Nandan Nilekani led Unique Identification (UID) project will be decided by the Cabinet Committee on Unique Identification (CCUID) next week.

The panel headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to sort out differences between the Union Home Ministry and the Planning Commission over collection of data.

The meeting, to be attended by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Home Minister P Chidambaram, Planning Commission Chairman Montek  Ahluwalia and UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani, will also discuss some of the contentious issues of the project including duplication of National Population Registry (NPR) and UID, expenses, and enrollment of citizens for Aadhaar numbers.

The Planning Commission, under which the UIDAI functions, in its note, has sought permission to enrollment beyond 20 crore residents on the ground that the project objective was totally different from the NPR. It  also said that as the authority is likely to complete its targeted 20 crore enrollment by end of January 2012, unless the government allows it to enroll more residents, work of the UID project would come to a standstill.

Defending its steps of allowing multiple registrars to collect the demographic and biometric information of all willing residents, the plan panel said that as several welfare programmes could be delivered through Aadhaar to the beneficiaries, the government could save huge amount of subsidy by preventing leakages. Apart from this, Aadhaar scheme has a more secure architecture with online authentication, the note said.

The note also explained the UIDAI’s point of view to the objections raised by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance last month on The National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010.

It may be noted that initially the government had asked the UIDAI to collect biometric details of 20 crore citizens up till March 2012 and later it would converged with NPR. This means, once NPR rolled out, it can use the biometric data of the UIDAI and issue citizenship card with unique number on it. However, after receiving the complaints that several illegal immigrants got the Aadhaar number, the Home Ministry refused to use the data collected by UIDAI saying that it was not foolproof.

As the NPR is tasked to issue multi-purpose national identity card which aims to prevent illegal migration, the Home Ministry is of the view that it can do the enrollment job without flaw unlike the UIDAI.