India is projecting growth rate of 8% for 2010. I am sure Chinese would probably do 8%. So unless india is also faking GDP ....
I really do not see why it is so difficult to implement an identity card system together with a POSB type banking to cater to the 456M who live on less than $1.25 a day. Hope this infosys billionaire is not trying to scam gov out of the $$$. Do not see why it will cost $6.6B to setup a national identification computer system.
By Bibhudatta Pradhan and Saikat Chatterjee
Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Corrupt officials in the Indian state of Bihar steal a third of laborer Balram Singh’s $2.20 daily wage, withdrawing money from his post office account without providing proof of identity.
“We don’t get the full wages,” said Singh, 48, who toils in Jamui district in the eastern state under a jobs program set up in 2006 to tackle village poverty. Money is withdrawn and distributed by a supervisor, who takes a cut. “We just give a thumb print on a piece of paper,” said Singh, who is illiterate.
To help the hundreds of millions of rural poor like Singh, India turned to billionaire Infosys Technologies Ltd. founder Nandan Nilekani to devise a fraud-proof identity number. A year from now he’ll begin rolling out the world’s biggest biometric database to enable the half of India’s 1.2 billion people who lack access to financial services to open an ICICI Bank Ltd. account or sign up for a Vodafone Group Plc mobile phone.
“There is huge mass of people who don’t have any form of acknowledged existence,” Nilekani, who stepped down as co- chairman of Infosys in July to set up the Unique Identification Authority of India, said in an interview in New Delhi. “There is no limit to how this number can be used. It’s like a road. What travels on the road, we don’t know.”
A secure identity database will remove one of the biggest hurdles preventing the poor from accessing state benefits and the wider economy, Nilekani, 54, said.
Rapid Growth
Nilekani’s appointment was part of efforts by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’sCongress party-led government to increase incomes for more of the 456 million Indians the World Bank says live on less than $1.25 a day.
India, the world’s fastest growing major economy after China, may expand by up to 8 percent this fiscal year, according to the finance ministry, just shy of the average 8.7 percent growth in the four years ended March 31.
Nilekani, who at Infosys served clients including General Motors Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., plans to appoint a consultant next month to draft a tender to run the database that will include names, dates of birth, fingerprints and photographs.
“I’ve a mandate to give an identity number to every Indian resident and the two big drivers for that are to create one more form of inclusion and to improve the quality of public spending,” Nilekani, who aims to allot the first 16-digit number in February 2011 and cover 600 million people in five years, said Jan. 12.
While using the numbers won’t be compulsory, Nilekani said the program’s advantages will attract banks and utilities wanting to target fraud and help the government ensure subsidies that account for more than 14 percent of India’s total expenditure, or $28 billion, reach their intended beneficiaries.
Stop Corruption
“When you find ways and means to stop corruption, people find ways to circumvent it,” said Nikhil Dey, a founder of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, or Workers and Farmers Unity Organization, which works in the western state of Rajasthan and audits the jobs program that pays Balram Singh. Secure ID may cut fraud “but it will still need a constant vigil.” Technology will have to be extremely robust, he said.
India has experience of tallying and tracking people across the world’s biggest democracy -- 714 million people were eligible to vote in 2009’s parliamentary election. More than 40 million households across India, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, participate in the jobs program.
Still, Nilekani will need to overcome technological challenges and ensure the project doesn’t exacerbate India’s budget deficit, estimated to reach a 16-year high in March. Nilekani told lawmakers Dec. 16 the program may cost about 300 billion rupees ($6.6 billion), without giving a time period.
Outweigh Benefits
“There is no clear estimate of the cost involved in implementing the project,” which could outweigh the benefits, said R. Ramakumar, an assistant professor specializing in rural development at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, in an interview from Mumbai.
Cost is the least of Rakesh Kumar’s worries. Kumar, 23, has been repairing shoes under a tree near India’s federal parliament in the capital after losing his job as a parking attendant in 2007. Nine years after leaving his Rajasthan village he doesn’t own a mobile phone and doesn’t receive the subsidized food and cooking gas he’s entitled to.
“It’s easy to buy a phone but they won’t give me a connection until I can provide an address proof,” said Kumar, who lives in an illegal settlement in the city’s south.
India has made it mandatory for mobile phone operators including New Delhi-based Bharti Airtel Ltd., India’s largest, to verify the identity of applicants to eliminate fake users and improve security.
The identity number project “has the potential to empower every citizen, bring transparency, and boost the economy -- if it’s implemented properly,” said Kris Dev, an e-governance consultant based in Chennai.
To contact the reporter on this story: Bibhudatta Pradhan in New Delhi at
[email protected]; Saikat Chatterjee in New Delhi at
[email protected].
Last Updated: January 21, 2010 13:30 EST
