Identity Project's List: Hindu - Businessline

"The Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC) has allotted five acres of land in Manesar to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for setting up of a data centre.

As part of the Aadhaar project, the Central Identification Data
Repository (CIDR) will be established with an investment of Rs 275 crore, an official release said here on Monday.

While Rs 160 crore would be spent on the data centre infrastructure development and building, R115 crore would be incurred on civil and other miscellaneous works, it said.

The total built up area would be more than two lakh sq ft and the green data centre would be in addition to the existing centre at Bangalore."

"Pune, Sept. 25:

Around 600 million Indians will possess Aadhaar cards by the middle of 2014, Mr Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India, has said.

So far 33 million people have been issued the cards while another 40 million have been enrolled, he revealed, adding that currently a total of 600,000 new people were being enrolled at 20,000 locations across the country every day.

“This will go to one million a day by October,” he said and added that the biggest demand was from people who did not have an alternate way to establish their identity.
No duplication

With bio-metrics – ten fingerprints and retina imaging – the basis of the Aadhaar cards, Mr Nilekani called the ‘de-duplication' technology the most important part of the UID architecture."

"Mangalore, Sept. 23:

The framework for the establishment of Karnataka Resident Data Hub will be ready in two districts by March.

The hub, which is based on the data collected under the Unique Identification Authority of India's Aadhar scheme, will help in the effective implementation of social security programmes in the State, according to Dr D.S. Ravindran, Chief Executive Officer of E-Governance Cell of the Karnataka Government.

Pilot work

In an informal chat with Business Line on the sidelines of a workshop on Aadhar here on Friday, he said: “We are starting the pilot work in Mysore and Tumkur districts. The framework for the hub will be ready by March 2012. The establishment of Aadhar will help give a shape to it.”

Asked about the reasons for selecting these two districts for the pilot project, he said 97 per cent of people in these two districts have enrolled under Aadhar scheme. "

"Even as it fine-tunes norms for financial inclusion, the Reserve Bank of India should desist from micro-managing banks in the process.

Imagine an India where every resident, irrespective of location, is able to make financial transactions electronically with anybody, individuals or firms, anywhere in the country. This is the vision spelt out by the Reserve Bank of India in its ‘Operational Guidelines - Implementation of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) and its convergence with Financial Inclusion Plan (FIP)', issued on August 12.

This document with its deceptively bland title has some very interesting insights into what is currently the most happening space on the policy front. For all the visionary perspective, the route to this goal appears rather convoluted. "

"New Delhi, May 26:

The Government is expected to connect five lakh villages with the internet broadband services under the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) in the next two years.

“We have set-up a high powered committee, Sam Pitroda is heading the committee, co-chaired by Nandan Nilekani. I am told by Sam Pitroda that he will try and implement the policy within next two years (by 2013),” the Telecom Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, said today.

The Minister was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a Fibre to Home (FTTH) conference.

The Government earlier had proposed creating a NOFN for providing broadband connectivity to the rural areas initially up to the panchayats."

"New Delhi, May 24:

The Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, on Tuesday asked the Income-Tax Department to prepare for transition to the Direct Taxes Code (DTC) regime, which will be ushered in from April 1 next year.

He also announced the Government decision to set up a “directorate of criminal investigation “within the Income Tax Department to deal with tax crimes related to illegal activities”.

Also, a National Information Utilities for CBDT has been approved, Mr Mukherjee said in his address at the 27{+t}{+h} Annual conference of Chief Commissioners and Directors General of Income Tax in the Capital.

This will provide operational flexibility and space for the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to rollout innovative services to taxpayers, he added while asking the Tax Department to operationalise it on priority basis. "

""Our youngest and the brightest have gone there (the US). It is benefitting the US. We are not going and taking away jobsbut generating employment there."
Chennai, Aug. 4:

Rejection of visas [to Indian software engineers going to US] is a political issue and the Government has to handle it as ‘our citizens' are denied visas, said Mr Som Mittal, President, Nasscom.

“We think it is a trade barrier that is being created. The Government also made this very clear. It is a matter of concern because it creates uncertainty for our companies,” he told Business Line last week on the sidelines of the two-day Nasscom Summit HR held here.

A company may commit its client that within a week a few engineers will be in the US but could not be sure what the US will do in terms of rejection. The impact of rejection will actually be on the US economy because when Indians go there they contribute to the local schools, local society and they are large spenders there. However, they do not get social security. "

"New Delhi, Aug. 14:

Mr Nandan Nilekani wants to know how the Gujarat Government managed to weed out 14 lakh bogus ration cards, and that too, in just four months.

So, the Task Force he heads will hear presentations from Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and six other States on August 17.

The Task Force is trying to suggest ways to provide direct cash subsidies to the poor for buying foodgrains and sugar. It intends to suggest an end-to-end solution which includes complete computerisation of the PDS. It has to submit its report by August 31.

Gujarat model

Gujarat had launched a new model for the PDS on April 1 with software developed by NIC. The software helps in getting a biometric impression from the ration card holder and prints a barcode on the card.

Very few villages have computers. So, E-Gram machines in clusters of villages have been installed. These machines read the bar code and issue coupons to the card holder, who can then collect his rations from the nearest assigned fair price shop.

"

"New Delhi, July 23:

The Telecom Commission has given its approval to the proposed national optical fibre network (NOFN) for offering broadband services in rural areas.

The network, to be built at an estimated cost of Rs 20,000 crore, will connect all the gram panchayats. The project will be funded by the Universal Services Obligation Fund.
Optical fibre network

“The objective of the scheme is to extend initially the existing optical fibre network from districts HQ's/Block HQ's level up to the gram panchayat level by utilising Universal Service Obligation Fund. The cost of the initial phase of the NOFN scheme is likely to be in the region of Rs 20,000 crore. Similar amount of investment is likely to be made by private sector complementing the NOFN infrastructure while providing services to individual users,” Mr Kapil Sibal, Minister for Communications and IT said. The proposal will now be placed before the Union Cabinet for final approval. "

"In what could be a major step in ensuring that subsidies actually reach the poor, a task force headed by Unique Identification Development Authority of India (UIDAI) Chairman Nandan Nilekani has recommended phased implementation of transferring subsidy for LPG, kerosene and fertiliser directly to bank accounts by leveraging the Aadhar database. It has also recommended capping of subsidised cylinders for households.

The task force had been set up in the Budget this year to find ways of stopping leakages in subsidies on which the government spends Rs 80,000 crore a year. "

"New Delhi, July 5:

If Mr Nandan Nilekani has his way, consumers will be able to purchase liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders straight off the shelf without even having a connection.

A Task Force, headed by the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), has recommended capping the number of cylinders that consumers can buy at the current highly-subsidised prices – even while emphasising that this is policy decision for the Government to take.

Once the cap is introduced, consumers would purchase all their cylinders from oil companies at the market price, with the Government fixing a per-cylinder subsidy.

This subsidy would be directly transferred from the Government to the consumers' Aadhar (Unique Identification Number)-enabled bank accounts. "

"July 10, 2011:

Back in the 1950s there was a very popular song by Frank Sinatra. The opening lines went:

“Love and marriage,

Go together like horse and carriage;

This I tell you brother,

You can't have one without the other.”

It is exactly like that with politicians. Bad ideas and they go together like tics on dogs in the monsoon because of the inherent conflict between their moral compasses and incentives structures. As the same song says, “Try, try, try to separate them, it's an illusion.”

Politicians look for ways of gaining sanction and legitimacy for bad ideas. In the old days, intellectuals would be roped into the enterprise. These days business leaders are used for this purpose. But the effect is the same. "

"In terms of pure economic theory, all subsidies are bad; but in terms of political practice, they are manna from heaven. As long as politicians and bureaucrats make the rules, there are certain types of outcomes based on simple premises. The politicians want political credit and the bureaucrats want policies simple to implement. But sometimes economists jump into the fray, and in the name of elegant and efficient solutions, they end up creating problems for the bureaucrats who have to implement these solutions. The politicians, of course, continue to hog the credit. The proposal to replace price subsidies on kerosene, fertiliser and cooking gas with income subsidies is a long awaited one, the design of the whole movement from one to the other being entrusted to a technocrat, namely, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chairman, Mr Nandan Nilekani. The Finance Ministry statement says that the task force has been set up “in order to evolve a suitable mechanism for direct subsidies to individuals/families who are entitled to kerosene, LPG and fertiliser and to evolve a model of direct transfer of subsidies on these items by re-engineering existing systems, processes and procedures in the implementation process…” Nice, but will the exercise once again trip on the practicalities? The answer depends on the product and Mr Nilekani has to take a nuanced view of the various issues involved. "

"New Delhi, Feb. 22:

The unique identity number, Aadhaar, may be recognised as a proof of identity for satisfying know-your-client (KYC) norms in the securities market.

The Government today said that that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has suggested constituting a joint working group of SEBI and UIDAI officials to work out the modalities for this purpose.

To examine the modalities for making Aadhaar applicable for KYC norms and to formulate their views on the matter, the SEBI has now constituted an internal working group with members from various departments. "

"New Delhi, March 8:

The Government has provided a subsidy of Rs 24.38 a litre on PDS kerosene and Rs 320.38 per cylinder on domestic LPG as on March 1.

This information was given by the Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Mr S. Jaipal Reddy, to the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.

He also said that the total subsidy on PDS kerosene and domestic LPG during 2009-10 and April-December 2010 is Rs 34,391 crore and Rs 29,525 crore, respectively. The Minister further said that consumers get PDS kerosene and LPG cylinders at a subsidised price.

The subsidy is transferred to the public sector oil marketing companies – Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOC), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL).

In order to avoid the leakages in the system, the Government is working out modalities for cash transfer of subsidies using the AADHAR platform operated by Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), he added. "