I have been a rather harsh critic of Indian English-language media but I was pleased to see Mr Karan Thapar with good research systematically expose the other day the nonsense being purveyed by Mr Nandan Nilekani about the idea of branding each of a billion Indians with a government number. This is not Auschwitz. Nor can India create an American-style Social Security Administration. Mr Nilekani seems not to have the faintest idea about India’s poor and destitute, else he would not have made a statement like “We need one single, non-duplicate way of identifying a person and we need a mechanism by which we can authenticate that online anywhere because that can have huge benefits and impact on public services and also on making the poor more inclusive in what is happening in India today.” (italics added)
What does he plan to do? Haul away the hundreds of thousands of homeless from the streets and flyovers of our major cities and start interrogating, measuring, photographing and fingerprinting them against their will? On what ploy? That without the number he will give them they will not be able to continue to live and do what they have been doing for half a generation? Or that they will get a delicious hot meal from the Taj or Oberoi if they cooperate? And what about rural India? Does he plan to make an aerial survey of India’s rural landscapes by helicopter to find whom he can catch to interrogate and fingerprint? It will be grotesquely amusing to see his cohorts try to identify and then haul away India’s poor from their normal activities — he and his friends will likely come to grief trying to do so! Guaranteed. And the people will cheer because they know fakery when they see it.
Mr Nilekani needs to ask his economist-friends to teach him about asymmetric information, incentive-compatiblity theory etc. There have been several Bank of Sweden prizes given to economists for this material, beginning with FA Hayek in 1974 or even earlier.
(As for the wholly different stated agenda of preventing crime and terrorism using Mr Nilekani’s numbering, might we recall that Kasab’s dead companions have remained unclaimed in a Mumbai morgue for almost ten months now?)
The whole exercise that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has with such fanfare set Mr Nilekani is ill-conceived and close to complete nonsense — designed only to keep in business the pampered industry that Mr Nilekani has been part of as well as its bureaucratic friends. The Prime Minister has made another error and should put a stop to it before it gets worse. The poor have their privacy and their dignity. They are going to refuse to waste their valuable time at the margins of survival volunteering for such gimmickry.
Subroto Roy
Kolkata
