Digital Delivery of Services - The Indian Landscape

Digital Delivery of Services the Indian Landscape
Ashish Rajadhyaksha Senior Fellow, CSCS and Principal Investigator, The Identity Project
The Identity Project of CSCS (2010-13) began with the idea of providing the possible framework for a debate on the massive move towards the digitisation of government services launched by the Government of Indias National e-Governance Plan of 2006. The essay points to six key stresspoints that emerged in the course of the field research over seven Indian states.
THE PROJECT
In 2010, the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society launched The
Identity Project as a two-year initiative following a grant from the Ford Foundation. The purpose of the project was to research, document, and contextualise the Last Mile of governance in India in the light of the massive digitisation of delivery of several major state benefits at both Central and State levels. The project emerged as a result of our dissatisfaction with the nature of the debate that was emerging on the area of digital governance in India. It appeared necessary to distance ourselves as much from techno-utopians who promised overnight change with new technology as from those who presented a dystopian imagination of extreme State surveillance. It also appeared necessary to recognise the many legal and procedural issues that several of the new digitisation initiatives were creating: in immediate terms,
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in their limitations, as well as in the larger terms of a transforming State apparatus that often found itself out of its depth in dealing with the new challenges of digitisation. Over the past three years we have conducted numerous field visits in seven Indian states (see Chapter 8 for details). These visits include numerous video-conversations, some short and others very long, with a diverse number of those who were involved with this entire process of participating in the emergence of a digital ecosystem of governance. These are interviews with people being enrolled into the Aadhaar programme, with district-level Panchayat and other officials, with numerous State government bureaucrats, with private enrollment representatives, representatives of various governmental services, with operators and other members of this digital workforce. Conversations are often long, spontaneous and deliberately unstructured: and the focus is mainly on a vrit style using amateur video (for full archives see: http://cscs.pad.ma). Emerging from these visits, CSCS conducted several public consultations, focusing on some key issues that we shortlisted for detailed inquiry: those of migrants, both domestic and across international borders (see chapters 14 and 15), homelessness in cities (chapters 16 and 17), and the financially excluded (chapter 18). Each of these areas was discussed in considerable detail at major public consultations held in Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, in partnership with the CSDS, the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (who have brought out their own volume on our joint consultations),1 and the Urban Research and Policy Programme Initiative of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. All videos of all presentations made at these events are also available at the CSCS repository. A selection of the presentations made there is a part of this book. CSCS also has an extensive text archives of material on the field as a whole, available on http://eprints.cscsarchives.org. With this material and with these publications, we believe we have attempted to capture, keeping a wide range of concerns alive, the issues that
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define the domain of digitising governance and the experience of India, with all its contradictions and social tensions, going digital. It was important for us to recognise that the process of an Indian people moving, along with various aspects of State administration, into a digital domain could also mean, so to say, the translation of existing social conflicts into an e-variant. We hope that the vast archives available in free access to researchers, that has been put together in the assumption that in capturing the present contradictions, conflicts, and tensions of the digital ecosystem of governance as they play themselves out, we are capturing something of historic importance in India today. The remaining part of this introductory essay speculates on the issues that could underpin that importance. We provide here a series of six stress points that our field work yielded.
AADHAAR AND THE LAST MILE PROBLEM

now-famous Aadhaar project launched in February 2009. The founding of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that monthand with it the ambition to provide a unique identification number to all Indian residents that would be robust enough to eliminate duplicate and fake identities, and verifiable and authenticable in an easy, cost-effective waywas, we felt, potentially a definitive intervention into what has for long come to be known as the last mile problem in independent India.
The Identity Project defined its purpose in the wake of the
The founding document of the Authority was its 2009 working paper, Creating a Unique Identity Number for Every Resident in India.2 Here at least, the Authority claimed that, on its own, it would be no more than this: it would be a number, not a card, with the UIDAIs role limited only to issuing that number. However, the UID number could itself appear on several smart cards, issued by partner programmes in different States, as well as by banks and perhaps other private services. The UID itself would function as an online
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service, with a straight yes-no authentication, and the Aadhaar number would by itself be a random number without intelligence since, they claim, loading intelligence onto identity numbers made them susceptible to fraud and theft. What Aadhaar would do is to assist the entry of residentsin other words, all those who cared to enter itinto a digital ecosystem, and it would in turn assist the ecosystem that was emerging to function adequately, through linking the biometricand with it the data that the biometric would generatewith the person. The process of entry into the digital ecosystem, the process of enrollment, would (as per the original vision) be diverse: would permit a numerous set of Registrars making available numerous entry-points to potential enrollees. Aadhaar itself has been careful to limit its own promise to providing no more than a nationwide authentication and de-duplication structure. Unlike purpose-driven identity definitions such as social security numbers, voting registrations or driving licenses, Aadhaar is in itself purposeless, an empty vessel: purpose would be needed to be added to it by the services that needed it, and it would then define its own purpose to suit theirs. In 2006, the Department of Information Technology announced the 27 Mission Mode projects of the National E-Governance Plan (NeGP). Among the integrated MMPs were to be the Common Service Centres, and several e-delivery services such as e-Biz (for Government-to-business schemes), e-Courts, e-Procurement, electronic data interchange systems for trade, including 247 access to users, increase transparency in procedures, reduce transaction cost and time, and introduce international standards and practices in the area of clearance of export/import of cargo, a national e-governance service delivery gateway etc. Key MMPs to be taken up by the Central Government included e-banking, excise and customs, income tax, insurance, passports, and pension schemes, and at the State level they would include commercial taxes, land records, municipal records, and gram panchayats. Since the UIDs production of identity is meant to be used for all of the above purposes, it has become something of a chimera, attributed with whatever downstream purpose to which it will now be put. This plethora
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of definitional responsibilities the UIDAI has willingly taken on, having assiduously advocated and marketed the varied uses to which both the State and the market intends to put it, but it is important to note that these are autonomous domains of functioning, often defining policies and procedures that are not common to each other. And so, as the big picture has gradually emerged, and as the potential for usage of this service has come to be understood across different parts of the country even as the de-duplication/authentication process has started being coupled to an astonishingly diverse set of schemes by different local governments, Aadhaars own claims have in turn got refracted through a number of further claims by a number of independent agencies, both governmental and private, on what such an initiative could do for India: and what it was doing to India. The Digital Ecosystem and the Last Mile Problem Our project has been concerned with this diverse digital ecosystem of governance itself, rather than with Aadhaar as such. It recognises that Aadhaar is a cog in a wheel, or more appropriately, perhaps, a single cog linking a discrete set of giant wheels. There are other cogs functioning with various degrees of efficiency, but the UID has been perhaps the only cog to have conceptualised the wheel itself, so to say, often leading people to make the common mistake of confusing the part for the whole. Here we define the wholethe digital ecosystemas nothing less than the public domain of the 21st century. As such it has several characteristics similar to the original public domain that emerged in the 18th, 19th, or even based on where you were, the 20th centuries, but also it also bears key differences. It has the highways, the streets, the locations of public gathering, debate and discussion, the capacity to associate and mobilise, and with it apparently go specific rights, as they did to its predecessor: the right to assemble freely, to speak freely. And, like the physical public domain, it has the alleyways and bylanes, the spaces of anonymity and of ambiguity: spaces where the rule of law does not reach, is ambiguous, or even absent.
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The parallels between the digital ecosystem and the classical public sphere both illuminate and confuse. To a very great extent, the apparent parallels have allowed the properties of virtuality to be comprehended through that resemblance and with the same apparatus that characterised its 19th century predecessor: a problem particularly virulent in privacy debates where the concept of privacy that the digital domain is often accused of violating is unchanged from its 19th century origins. On the other hand, there is also in evidence a growing recognition of the limit to the parallel: of instances where the digital ecosystem differs in key aspects to the classic public domain, and may be producing phenomena that could be unprecedented to the classical public sphere. In defining the last mile problem for ourselves, we felt that there was growing evidence to show that the problem primarily lay in the structure of a centralised State being unable to even comprehend, or find appropriate mechanisms to either define or regulate, this new ecosystem. This project takes on board growing evidence that, contrary to its typical image of a fully automated computer-driven hyper-rationality (which is how modern States would like to conceive it), the digital ecosystem of governance is rife with internal contradiction. Further, contrary to its rational imagination, it also possesses an organicity and may indeed, in this respect, bear some similarity to the social networking process. One of the key points our researchers make in this book is that it grows locally, in diverse ways, depending on how different issues around digitisation are locally comprehended, and how the system is put to local use. The centralised imagination of the State often therefore presents itself as a barrier to this organic growth. This barrier, we propose, is a crucial component of the last mile problem, and we believe we are right now witnessing situations where the Indian state is facing up to a major technological challenge that could threaten its very existence in its present form. In the rest of this Introduction, we will provide a small list of such conflicts and stress points. These stress points are both, at one level, specificin that these constitute the day-to-day contradictions and negotiations of entering
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and navigatingand foundational, in that they provide several of the ethical bases upon which, we propose, the digital public sphere will now be defined: sequel forms to the various rights that defined its classical ancestor. Governance and the Last Mile Problem Is the challenge posed by digitisation an unprecedented one? It is not new for India to take on the latest available technology and assume that it can now, miraculously and overnight, reach out to the remotest parts of the country. The famous last mile problem, a variant of the horse-and-water metaphor, has been primarily concerned with the fact that intended beneficiaries of state benefit do not receive what is meant for them: mainly due to distortions in the system at the receivers end. These days, the term has been widened to include problems that affect most schemes of public policy, from disaster relief to housing and food subsidies, where it is widely assumed that benefits do not percolate to those who need them most; and it today captures a long history of the capacity of developmental schemes to slice through the barriers of reception to both identify and to reach their intended addressees. Perhaps the classic avatar of overcoming the Last Mile through technology was scientist Vikram Sarabhais contention that the key reasons for problems in last mile delivery in India were linguistic diversity and geographical distance,3 and his suggestion in the late 1960s that terrestrial television could in one stroke overcome these problems by reaching out to all of Indias population wherever they are. Considered by many as the classic example of Indias fascination with technological leapfrogging,4 the Sarabhai model provides the classic example of developmental fascination with communications media, linking key tenets of democratic citizenship to connectivity. The mapping of media upon developmentalist-democratic priorities has been the dominant characteristic of communications technology since at least the invention of the radio in the 1940s, and has provided the major rationale for successive technological developments, from the 1960s wave of portable transistors to the terrestrial transponders of the first televisual revolution in the early 1980s, the capacity of satellite since SITE and the INSAT series, and from the 1990s the arrival of wired networks (LANs, Cable, fibre-optic) followed by wireless (WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA).
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One way of comprehending the problem is therefore this: how to translate, or scale up, a communications-driven mode of centralised state-addressingremote citizen into a model by which the state could reach benefit to the doorstep of that remote citizen? The pivotal role given to broadcast media to somehow overcome the last mile between the late 1960s and culminating with the Special Plan for the Expansion of Television in 1981, provides one legacy to the 1990s emphasis on electronification (to use UIDAI Chairman Nandan Nilekanis term), in defining the last mile in terms of technological delivery of state welfare, as well as its capacity to overcome what has sometimes been considered an unbridgeable gap between the intended and the actual beneficiary of development. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the major fascination with the concept of convergence attempted to forge new coalitions between historically disparate agendas, and to find a single solution for multiple ends. Nilekani writes (Imagining India, 2008): Around the 2000s, the impact of electronification in India began to change. It started to rapidly evolve from a top-down system driven by government policy and industry into a force surging up from the grassroots. Indian entrepreneurs big and small were at this point focusing on the possibilities of building a unique business approachbased on the idea that you could vastly expand the pool of Indian consumers if you were willing to focus on extremely low-cost products. When IT met this strategy, its presence exploded. Even as Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), P&G, Nirma, and Cadbury began selling everything from shampoos to soap, detergent and chocolate in tiny single serve packets costing a rupee or less, banking firms such as ICICI began to offer micro loans and hospitals such as Aravind Eye offered targeted, low-cost health services, technology entrepreneurs began offering lowcost internet and computer usage to villagers across rural India. [A]s the possibilities in such low-cost technology began to explode, firms across retail, banking and communications found that IT could well be their missing link in connecting with people who were often illiterate and located in distant villages, dirt-road miles away from the nearest market. And reform-minded bureaucrats found that such technology, untouched
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as it were by the legacies of the sarkar raj, could be a powerful leverage for better public services. IT could play a bigger and more powerful role in the economy than anyone had guessed or attempted before.5 Are we right in seeing a similarity in Nilekanis view on IT and Sarabhais view on terrestrial and later satellite television? There are key similarities: both present a somewhat benevolent Stateor now a State-Corporatestructure benignly taking on the most recent technologies to do its job better. But the differences in their position are crucial, and constitute a record of whats changed since the 1970s. The difference is partly in the changed nature of the State itself: in the new Public-Private Partnerships being envisaged, and thereby of the intensity of the change being launched. The former communications model of reaching out to citizens in remote areas was now being significantly extended by Information and Communications Technology with at least two additional responsibilities that Sarabhai could not have imagined: of defining, identifying, the marginalised, and then of mounting physical benefit upon the communications channel. There was also a change in the model itself: such identification happened because, as Nilekani contends, we were no longer speaking of a top-down model: this was a force surging up from the grassroots. Stresspoint # 1: Top-down State versus lateral market-driven benefit: On the one hand, then, and continuing the Sarabhai vision of a benevolent State apparatus scaling up to better deliver its benefit, the 2011 draft Electronic Delivery of Services (EDS) Act proposed that, if passed by Parliament, the Act would make it mandatory for every government organisation to deliver public services in electronic mode. Each Ministry/ Department would be required to identify the basket of citizen-centric services, and these benefits would include an efficient, transparent, and reliable delivery of web enabled public services in a definite and time bound manner to citizens, thereby transforming Governance, and to eliminate the need for a citizen to go to Government offices to seek services.6 On the other hand, in departure from the Sarabhai model (and indeed departing from the
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strongly governmental service-delivery mechanism), Nilekani personally did not think that the delivery of benefit would happen primarily with the government: indeed, such web-based delivery was only a small detail in a much larger picture. Once the model was properly in place once a beneficiary got identified and so to say brought into the digital arena, the market would do the rest. He made the upbeat assumption that as regulations eased up, market players have brought in remarkable synergies into the rise of a single market. Freeing up the private sector has allowed entrepreneurial energy to work its way through infrastructure barriers and connect markets, thus building innovative, interlinked networks from scratch, and that the new focus on single market synergies is also driving reform towards national policies and infrastructure around critical sectors (in Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century, 2008). Despite the immense optimism in the 1990s around convergence and the opportunities around PPP, and Nilekanis confident assertion that firms across retail, banking, and communications could make common cause with better public services through their joint discovery of technology untouched by the legacies of the sarkar raj that could be their missing link in connecting with people who were often illiterate and located in distant villages, dirt-road miles away from the nearest market, the capacity of delivering public services through the marketplace has been a matter of considerable concern for many in India.7 For example, in his essay Markets, State and Social Opportunity (2000), Amartya Sen offers more elaborate explanations for the conditions under which markets can work in tandem with development, and conditions when they cannot. He writes, The role that markets play must depend not only on what they can do but also on what they are allowed to do. There are many people whose interests are well served by the smooth functioning of markets, but there are also groups whose established interests may be hurt by such functioning. If the latter groups are politically more powerful and influential, then they can try and see that not given adequate room in the economy Confronting such influences has to occur not merely through resistingand perhaps
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even exposingthe seekers of profit from captive markets, but also from taking on their intellectual arguments as proper subjects of scrutiny. How does one take on the intellectual arguments of profit-seekers who prevent the smooth functioning of markets? Sen provides a number of explanations for why the market could have a historical resistance to the dissemination of public good. His explanation relates to why certain forms of dissemination that may have once emerged as a public good had to transform their premise in order to enter the marketand therefore, even if they are doing good, may not qualify as delivery mechanisms for the public good. His explanation may well have considerable relevance as much for understanding electronification as a social benefit, as for large schemes of public policy that would have had to find their own strategies of addressing the barriers of the market. The citizen/the resident/the beneficiary Let us go a bit further into the last mile problem. It is a common truism of Indian social sciences that the process of defining the normative citizen, the discursive beneficiary of state development, long precedes the far more complex process of naming that actual citizen of India. Partha Chatterjees legendary essay Beyond the Nation? Or Within? (2003), classifies the division between civil society represented by the citizen, and political society represented by the category of population, to propose that, long before the Indian state came up with an adequate normative mechanism to define the citizen as bearer of democratic rights and entitlements, it was able to extend key developmental systems of welfare well beyond the physical boundaries that characterised the norm: namely, the actually existing individuals in India who could practice citizenship in the full sense. It could do so by creating a parallel form of classification and enumeration that divided society into elementary units of population: numbers of people who could receive state benefit and nothing else. Unlike the citizen, he says, the concept of population is descriptive and empirical, not normative. Those listed under population measures do not normally have defined rights, but nevertheless exist as the beneficiaries of state welfare.
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Stresspoint # 2: Citizen versus beneficiary: The consequences of this move have been many. On the one hand, the normative citizen provided the Constitutional basis upon which the Indian state exists, since all welfare including all of its fundamental rights, crucially the right to shelter, the right to life and the right to votehad to be in the name of the normative citizen. However, since the vast numbers of the actual people of India did not qualify as normative citizens, a second structure of distribution had to work over the first. To protect its civil society, the Indian state had to make the benefits of welfare available to a population which, in addition to being named through processes such as the census, the ration card, and the bank account, was also named through the political processes of democracy. It was the job of the latter processes to transform not-quite-citizens into full members of civil society by extending the principles of associational behavior through voting, through political membership, etc. However, it is well known that the two processes did not work together well: indeed, civil societys extreme suspicion of political processeswidely viewed with scorn and derision as innately corrupteffectively meant that as per the norms of civil society functioning, the benefits of welfare could never efficiently percolate through the dense barriers set up by political interest groups. In many ways, this has constituted the classic definition of the last mile problem. What does the new digital ecosystem now do to this barrier? On its side, does an Electronic Delivery of Services simply translate this populational mechanism onto a digital platform, keeping it otherwise unchanged from its physical variant? Or would there also be a way by which the access of people to digital identityidentity now in the fullest possible sensealso transform the normative structure? In other words, assuming that Nilekani is right and that the digital ecosystem constitutes not merely a better but still unidirectional service-delivery mechanism but was a force surging up from the grassroots, would the complexity of a market-driven structure of overseeing entry into the digital ecosystem transform the very theory of the last mile?
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To understand this better, we need to look at three key concepts that seem to be new to the very idea of democracy as a political process in India. The first is the very concept of identity: as a form of selfhood, as something that an individual can act upon. The second, the idea of a resident: the assumption that such identity was not citizenship, but was more individually driven, and emanated so to say from the bodily properties of the person rather than from his/her belonging to a nation (as we see among migrant communities, but also refugees, both discussed extensively elsewhere in this book). Does this form of self-actualisation come into conflict with the concept of beneficiary, the recipient of targeted deliverya recipient who, as part of the contract of receiving, had to forego the self-enabling fact of digital citizenship? Would s/he be regulated to know that receiving benefit did not mean receiving the rights of citizenship? Stresspoint # 3: Voluntary versus compulsory enrollment: The above distinction between citizen and beneficiary directly impacts the one issue that has dominated all discussion of Aadhaar, namely whether it is a species of Identity Card or not, and if so, just what it is an identity of. The Authority has claimed that they would register anybody who lived in India who wanted to be registered. They would also not force anyone to be registered: but this right to not enroll is importantly overridden by any State benefit that is mounted on Aadhaar and makes it mandatory for a beneficiary to have an Aadhaar number. Jean Dreze, for example, has belittled the Authoritys claim that enrollment for Aadhaar is not compulsory given that in its own selfjustification, the UIDAI claims that all benefits and services linked to the UID will ensure demand for the number. This, he says, is like selling bottled water in a village after poisoning the well.8 Although Dreze is perhaps factually correct, in normative terms his argument may be erasing a thin but significant distinction between a law that makes it mandatory for citizens to register and one that does not make it mandatory, however essential it may be. The problem that we have is that government schemes that require you to have a UID number, leaving it up to you to decide whether you wanted the
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number or not (depending on whether you wanted that benefit or not), are very different from citizenship initiatives that do make it mandatory for you to have this number and illegal for you not to do so. We need to define identity carefully here: as a distinction between that which is chosen, as a condition of selfhood and produces a capacity to represent oneself in the public domain voluntarily, in a manner that is satisfactory to ones self-representation, and that which is assigned. The first includes a sense of entitlement, where individuals declare their unique individuality, is not the same as a populational record of peoples lives where people are issued an identity that only qualifies them as beneficiaries and nothing else. If there was one thing that emerged in our field meetings with enrollees, it was this. The primary problem has arisen, it appears to us, when biometrics have been mounted on several data resources that work with populational purposes that could fly in the face of aspirational entitlement. The best known of these data resources is of course the NATGRID, but it could include no less than, in the words of Home Minister P. Chidambaram, 21 sets of databases to achieve quick seamless and secure access to desired information for intelligence and enforcement agencies.9 These databases would include a DNA data bank, the NATGRID, and a series of others such as the Crime and Criminals Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS)10 and a National Counter Terrorism Centre,11 all of which could work together to make a devastating and unimaginable impact on surveillance. A consequence of the voluntary/mandatory issue of enrollment is the further one of whether the Government should be the sole Registrar, or whether there should be multiple market-driven registrar structures. The UIDAI itself was clear that there would have to be multiple registrars. The 2009 Working Paper says that the: Authority will partner with agencies such as central and state departments and private sector agencies who will be Registrars for the UIDAI. Registrars will process UID applications, and connect to the CIDR to de-duplicate resident information and receive UID numbers.
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These Registrars can either be enrollers, or will appoint agencies as enrollers, who will interface with people seeking UID numbers. The Authority will also partner with service providers for authentication. The UIDAI will emphasise a flexible model for Registrars: The Registrars will retain significant flexibility in their processes, including issuing cards, pricing, expanding KYR (Know Your Resident) verification, collecting demographic data on residents for their specific requirements, and in authentication. The UIDAI will provide standards to enable Registrars maintain uniformity in collecting certain demographic and biometric information, and in basic KYR. These standards will be finalised by the KYR and biometric committees the Authority constitutes. On the other hand, by some accounts if the NPR had its way, it would be the sole Registrar in India. The issue is not merely a turf battle within the Planning Commission and the Home Ministry as some have characterised it. Major issues hang on whether there is only a single point of entry into this digital ecosystem or a plurality of entries. As outlined by Usha Ramanathan, there seems to be a clear divide between the stated positions of the NPR and the UIDAI, although the NPR claims to be riding on the UIDAI to get its own work done.12 She points out that the NPR will be assembled, not under the Census Act of 1948 but under the Citizenship Act of 1955 and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules 2003.13 Unlike the Act, which has an express provision regarding confidentiality and would have made it impossible for the Government to share Census data with something like the UIDAI (since section 15 of the Census Act categorically makes the information that we give to the census agency not open to inspection nor admissible in evidence), information gathered in NPRs proposed house-to-house surveys, and the biometrics collected during the exercise, is expected to directly feed into the UID database. Conflicting directly with the UIDAIs claim to voluntary registration, the Citizenship Rules of 2003 class every individual and every head of family as an informant who will be penalised if every person in his household is not listed, or if the information provided by him is incorrect or outdated. Additionally, the rules also envisage an exercise in sifting citizens from residents, a distinction the
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UID does not make, since persons collecting NPR information are expected to exercise judgment in deciding whether those whose details are being taken down are citizens or not, and to categorise suspicious people for further investigation.14 How identity claims, and with them data that would allow the State to deliver services uniquely targeted to me and my needs, can be reconciled with initiatives around direct surveillance, therefore remains an open question: and almost the central conflict in the digital ecosystem as we have outlined it. Is there a way that current rights discourse can square the purpose of databases that apparently work very different definitions of both voluntariness and citizenship? Stresspoint # 4: Universal versus targeted benefit: To see the objects of targeting as patients rather than as agents can undermine the exercise of poverty removal in many different ways. The people affected by such policies can be very active agents indeed, rather than languid recipients waiting for their handouts. Not to focus on the fact that they think, choose, act, and respond is to miss something terribly crucial to the entire exerciseAmartya Sen.15 One very specific area where the entitlements question, as an issue of State delivery, came to play itself out was around the concept of targeting, that several State Governments introduced in their Public Distribution System (PDS) systems since June 1997. Targeting occurred through the creation of Below Poverty Line (BPL) and Above Poverty Line (APL) categories, after several complaints about the inefficiency of a Universal PDS and the problems it was having with reaching out to the truly needy. This concept of targeting has found few takers among the new proponents of social rights. Among the more trenchant attacks on targeting is by Himanshu and Abhijit Sen,16 who argue that not only does targeting increase inefficiency and leakage,17 but, crucially, that it violates constitutional rights. A universal PDS is the only option consistent fully with a rightsbased approach, and feasible alternatives that are more universal
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and less targeted are more likely to be effective in ensuring food security for the poor. Since a legal right must apply to all citizens with any exclusion defined precisely, targeting the poor or priority will involve definition of these terms and possible litigation. (While) targeting was considered when the UPA government was enacting earlier landmark legislations, finally both the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Right to Education Act, which govern schemes providing basic rights to citizens, are universal (ibid.) In contrast to such universality requirements, the National Advisory Councils final proposal for the National Food Security Act (NFSA) has been to provide subsidised foodgrains to 75% of the total population of the country, covering 90% of the rural and 50% of the urban population. These are to now be further divided into two categories: a priority group comprising 46% of rural and 28% of the urban population and a General group which would comprise 44% of the rural and 22% of the urban population. If this is not complex enough, the roll-out is expected to be even more complex: benefits will vary with household position on a below poverty line (BPL) list and a quarter will be ineligible for food security. This could be an administrative nightmare, say Himanshu and Sen, with no easy way to find credible criteria that can exclude half the urban population and also divide the included rural population into two halves for very different entitlements.18 Despite the concerns, it is now widely accepted that that the key methodology by which the civil-political divide would be cut through, eventually abolished, would be in the process of targeting. Such targeting would in turn split into two definitions: (1) Ensuring that the beneficiary was correct (i.e. to prevent leakage and corruption); and (2) Ensuring that the beneficiary qualified for the benefit. Effectively, the argument went, Direct Cash Transfers would be the means to solve both problems. Although the Direct Cash Transfers system was only launched as recently as the 2011 Budget, the strategy of major Centrally Sponsored Schemes working to make direct payments into beneficiary bank accountsand thus entirely bypassing the last mile barrier that is explicitly and irretrievably that
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of political societyhas been long discussed. In 2008, Kapur, Mukhopadhyay, and Subramanian outlined a big-picture scenario for what would eventually become, in key aspects, the DCT project.19 Their argument was the following. India had among the largest number of programmes directly addressing poverty eradication, one way or another. In 200607, there were at least 151 Centrally Sponsored Schemes entailing annual expenditures of about ` 72,000 crore. Thirty key schemes out of these accounted for ` 64,000 crore, i.e., almost 90%. If we added CSS programmes that called for additional central plan assistance, such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and the Backward Region Grant Fund (BGRF), the allocations to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) for procuring and distributing foodgrains through the public distribution system (PDS), fertilizer subsidies, kerosene, and LPG, the total amount of subsidies would rise to ` 88,000 crore. Kapur et al pointed to the enormity of waste that is associated with such schemes, contending that numerous reports pointed to one incontrovertible fact, namely that most of the resources were failing to reach their intended beneficiaries. Only a small fraction of overall resources reach the poor due to, in varying degrees, inefficiency of targeting (inability to reach the poor), leakages (to the non-poor), participation costs (foregone earnings that are especially consequential in employment programs) and large administrative costs. The authors quoted Planning Commission figures indicating that for every Rupee worth of food actually transferred to beneficiaries, the Government spent ` 3.65, suggesting leakage of about 70%. From this contention, the authors proposed a simple arithmetical solution: around 27.5% of Indias roughly 1.13 billion people are below the poverty line, i.e., about 310 million people or 70 million households. If the money spent on CSS and food, fertiliser and fuel subsidies were distributed equally to all these 70 million households, it would mean a monthly transfer of over ` 2,140 per household. This would be more than 70% of the urban poverty line income. Indeed, if the government simply gave eligible households the amount of money it spends on the PDS, this alone would entail a monthly transfer of more than ` 500 to each household, i.e., about 40% of the entire
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food budget for a household at the poverty line. More pertinently, such a transfer could allow them to simply buy the entire monthly PDS entitlement of 35 kilograms of rice or wheat in the open market, even at relatively high current market prices. The authors therefore proposed that central expenditures be redirected into a scheme of outright transfers to individuals, and to local governments. How would such a transfer scheme be implemented? Unlike the past, said Kapur et al, there were now robust technologies for making cash transfers that are reliable, transparent, and monitorable. The key issues were those of identifying the beneficiaries and determining the amount of transfers. Identification here was a significant challenge, given that cash transfer programs would create strong incentives for people to identify themselves as poor. It was therefore vital, said Kapur et al, to recognise that establishing an individuals identity is effectively almost more important than establishing her eligibility. Once an individuals identity is established, ineligible beneficiaries can be removed over time as the process of verification is strengthened. The authors noted that several smart cards have been proposed or are already in place: the voter ID card, the BPL card, and the NREGS job card, and in some states, the poor will have a health insurance card under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) and a PDS smart card. They therefore recommend that, rather than profligacy in ID cards, it was imperative that the various functionalities integrated within a single individual biometric service, which would be individual based as opposed to household-based. As we discovered in our field work, the only way in which the entire biometric structure makes sense to a vast amount of the bureaucracy in India is in the way it overcomes leakage. One UID Cost Benefit Analysis by the NIPFP proposed that stopping leakage due to ghost cards alone would be between 8-11% of the total PDS subsidy.20 Such over-emphasis on leakage prevention and on policing has virtually driven out any discussion on improving the quality of service delivery. As Amartya Sen asks, of the mechanism of targeting and the purpose of what could end up as new forms of policing: (1) What happens when large kinds of public good are not divisible into individual use
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(the only way most markets would comprehend delivery)?; (2) What happens when individuated developmental goals start getting available only for a fee, requiring uncomfortable tracking mechanisms based not on the beneficiarys need but on her ability to pay for them? Of the first point, he says: Those who have tended to take the market mechanism to be the best solution of every economic problem may want to inquire what the limitations of that mechanism might be (S)ome of the most important contributors to human capability may be hard to sell exclusively to one person at a time. This is especially so when we consider the so-called public goods, which people consume together rather than separately The rationale of the market mechanism is geared to provide private goods (like apples and shirts), rather than to public goods (like a malariafree environment), and it can be shown that there may be a good case for the provisioning of public goods, going beyond what the private markets would foster. Exactly similar arguments regarding the limited reach of the market mechanism apply to several other important fields as well, where too the provision involved may take the form of a public good. Defence, policing and environmental protection are some of the fields in which this kind of reasoning applies. There are also rather mixed cases The publicgoods argument for going beyond the market mechanism supplements the case for social provisioning that arises from the need of basic capabilities, such as elementary health care and basic educational opportunities. The second aspect, of individual capacities to pay, raises the more complicated question of identifying and naming specific beneficiaries as targets of development, and then of tracking and means-testing. This is a key concern, since many officials across different State governments have repeatedly claimed that Aadhaars greatest (indeed its only) utility is to permit targeted delivery. The problem, for Sen, is in whether the market has the capacity to at all transform the definition of the beneficiary in terms of capability handicaps as against income limitations. Since the potential beneficiaries are also agents of action, the art of targeting is far less simple than some advocates of means-testing tend
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to assume. It is important to take note of the problems involve in finetuning targeting in general and means-testing in particular, especially since the case for such targeting is, in principle, quite strong and cogent. Sen outlines the key distortions that may emerge, and which this project took as its key framework for assessing impact: (1) Information distortion, which has the key issue that it is not possible to eliminate cheating without putting honest beneficiaries at considerable risk; (2) Incentive distortion, where targeted support can in fact change peoples economic behavior fundamentally; (3) Disutility and Stigma, where identifying a person as, say, poor can stigmatise the beneficiary; (4) Administrative costs, invasive loss, and corruption: especially given the social costs of asymmetrical power that bureaucracy has over supplicating applicants; (5) Political sustainability and quality: especially given that targeted beneficiaries are politically weak. Stresspoint # 5: Anonymised versus targeted data: The other recent area, which also centrally takes on the question of entitlement, and targeted benefit, has been in the area of caste enumeration. India has seen this debate rage around whether we should or should not include caste data in the 2011 Indian Census that is presently underway. Among the most extreme attacks on the very idea of a Caste Census has been precisely the one around targeting: in the claim that such data would fix identities, and whether such fixityin the name of targeted benefitcan benefit anyone. The most trenchant advocate of this argument, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, has claimed that such a census would condemn us to the tyranny of compulsory identities so that we could from now on never escape caste. Our identities are not something we can choose; they are given as non-negotiable facts which we can never escape. The state has legitimised the principle that we will always be our caste... Is there not a deeper indignity being inflicted on those to whom emancipation is being promised? You will be your caste, no matter what.21 Upendra Baxi makes a counter-argument: he proposes, instead, that the transition from OBC enumeration to counting all castes could potentially inaugurate a shift away from targeted to non-targeted developmental
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approaches, so that we may in fact be moving away from fixed identities, not towards them.22 In the process, and while proposing that the logics of development require an equal regard for the OBC as well as non-OBC impoverished, Baxi also links this debate up with the one on BPL targeting, and to Jean Drezes attack on a targeted PDS. For Dreze, creating awareness of rights alongside creating accountability mechanisms was crucial, since not only did targeting undermine the notion that PDS entitlements are a matter of rightgiven that no one can have a right to a BPL cardbut it also weakened the ability of BPL households to enforce their rights. How does such a definition of implementable self-interest square with an anti-targeting stance? Are people so targeted willing to be so named, or could there also be (as Amartya Sen has suggested, and as we found especially in the instance of Delhis homeless population) a stigma associated with such naming? Clearly on the caste question there sometimes is a stigma, as V.K. Natraj points out, when he shows that students applying for engineering or medical college education often do not mention the name of their caste fearing that they may attract the creamy layer barrier.23 Such a refusal to be named, Baxi proposes, could very well also lead us to an opposite and more enabling conclusion. While caste is like language and religion, an identity that one inherits, it is both possible for one to value this inheritance and to want to adhere to ones castein which case this would represent agency rather than an imposition of any compulsory identityor of course to change, or repudiate, this identity by consciously defying caste norms and taboos. One may even acquire a different caste identity by choice, as has happened among religions through collective acts of conversion. If in this context, asks Baxi, as subjects rather than objects of governance, the worst-off peoples may justifiably feel so offended to answer questions about their caste, to the point of foregoing any census-based privileges, why should such self-chosen under-inclusion be a problem for honest governance practices? Do these acts of agency not point to
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any alternate ways of measuring indices of deprivation, consistent with respect and dignity of self-chosen identities of the respondents? Such new indices, says Baxi tellingly, would need to find ways to move away from the concept of identity as a substance and into practices of identification that would see identities as flows or as processes. What would it take for a technology of enumeration to build this kind of flexibility into it, as technology would have to do if it remained true to the concept of self-interest or, as Baxi has it, see identity as a flow or a process rather than as something fixed. It is of course commonsense that databases themselves work with fixed structures, so we would need a great deal of technological ingenuity to arrive at a database that can handle ambiguities such as these. And then there is of course the rights question, on whether both tagging and targeting violate human rights. Several concerns around the UIDs possible link with Caste enumeration are expressed in a letter to The Hindu on August 13, 2010.24 The authors, well known social scientists, are entirely in favour of a Caste Census, arguing that such a Census can better enable the distribution of national resources and opportunities, giving policymakers essential information on, say, sexratios, literacy, life expectancy, occupation, household assets, and so on, crucial evidence without which all the problems that are blocking the implementation of social justice policies will remain unsolved. Enumerating castes has compelling benefits for our society since it will invigorate our social justice policies; provide the credible evidence demanded by our judiciary; allow the revision of beneficiary group listings; and help profile Indias social diversity. However, they are completely opposed to the way the Government is going about it, since such a way will end up defeating the very purpose of enumerating caste. Their problem directly hits at the biometric process: the Caste Census is expected to take place in conjunction with the National Population Register (NPR) process at the biometric data capture stage. To this they object: firstly, because data can be compromised because it would
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be tagged on to the biometric documentation of about 84 crore Indians. This has, they say, serious constitutional-legal issues around the crucial question of confidentiality. The Census Act of 1948 had provided strong protection for all data collected by the Census, and so historically, although the Indian Census necessarily collects individual information, it has always released only aggregated and anonymised data. Such protection to individuals is now removed by the Citizenship Rules of 2003 which govern the NPR and the biometric data capture process, and hence there is every chance of the confidentiality of caste data being breached. And there is of course also the fact that outside agencies are likely to be involved in the process of data collection, whose bonafides are suspect. Such a coupling of the Caste Census with biometric data and with the NPR, they argue, actually sets back what is already a very complex exercise of enumeration. Even the most strident advocates of a Caste Census recognise that it is not an easy proposition. For them, the only answer is for the new technologies of biometrics to stay away from this. The only agency in India capable of handing such an exercise is the Office of the Registrar General, and this Office would be crippled if it has to now start collecting caste data at the stage of biometric capture. And what purpose would be served by such a process anyway? If the main reason to couple the caste census with biometrics is to eliminate inflation of numbers and to protect the integrity of the head count, there are other ways round the roadblock: for example, household population totals (along with gender breakup) that have already been collected in the House-listing and Housing Census Schedule can be used as a check on the caste data at the enumeration stage. Aspiration and falsification of data: What would any such exemplary system of enumeration of caste, one that could respect self-chosen identities, look like? Let us return to the idea of self-interest and the possibility of falsifying data, either through a refusal to give it, as Natraj suggests, or because one may have acquired a different identity, as Baxi points out. Deshpande and Johns major essay on the Census25 tends to dismiss the excessive importance given to falsification,
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or to the possibility that this could undermine the value of the data being gathered. Such fears, they say, are exaggerated and not thought through carefully. Deshpande and John agree that people may answer the question, What is your caste? differently on different occasions depending on whos asking, when they are looking for a bride for their son, seeking a favour from someone, or deciding who to vote for. In the present instance, of course, the person asking is the Enumerator who has arrived at their doorstep and they have effectively nothing to gain by lying, since whatever caste you name in the Census entitles you to nothing, given that caste certificates (on which reservations depend) are entirely unrelated to the Census. The question of respondents not knowing the correct answer is also unlikely to happen, say Deshpande and John, since typical Indian respondents are not likely to be in any fundamental existential doubt about their caste, given that such a luxury is only available only to an upper caste urban elite. The further contention of some commentators that people would arbitrarily choose what caste to claim, based on expectations of personal gain, is also not correct, say Deshpande and John, because: Given that the Census is counting what people would like to be counted, its main purpose is precisely to perform this act of aggregation that no individual or group can do. In this sense, the Census is indeed about that elusive level of reality called the social, which emerges into view only through aggregation. Though comprised only of individuals, this aggregate turns out to be much larger in social significance than the sum of its parts. Given all this, it is somewhat beside the point to worry about false information; indeed, it is hard to figure out what false and true might mean here. In this sense, and with respect to variables like caste or religion, the Census is something like a mandatory opinion poll. Viewing the Census as an opinion poll is a curious argument. What would happen if such an aspirational logicof people answering, not factually what is, but what they would like their answer to bewere applied to all questions on the Census?
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The other aspect, apart from the one of aspirational identity, is the elusive aspect of caste names: themselves, in their sheer proliferation, clearly a further aspect of the elusiveness of identity. Deshpande and John suggest further methodologies for working this out. Firstly, the standards of Census accountability must be determined with reference to its role and function. It would be absurd to make the Census accountable in the same way and to the same extent that an individual ethnographer is held accountable for her data. For each produces truths that the other cannot, and one does not falsify the other. Secondly, one way out is to give the local Enumerator who arrives at my doorstep some additional responsibilities: for example, followup questions like Is your caste known by any other names in your locality?, or is your family surname different from yours? They argue that synonyms for caste names are centripetal rather than centrifugal, that is, they will be tightly concentrated around a central core rather than diverging greatly from it. Local enumerators are almost certain to be able to recognise a family resemblance common to synonyms. Sonalde Desai takes on similar questions, but deepens the technical aspect through an innovative solution for how the database should be structured.26 In 2001, when data was last collected on SC/ST, enumerators were given official state-specific lists of SCs/STs and were asked to check whether the caste identification provided by the household matched the list; and so people enumerated would be marked as being SC or ST only if their caste or tribe was included in the list. The list only included Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists as being SC. Inevitably, several problems arose: castes noted by Enumerators did not match the caste list, and so several tribes went under-enumerated, leading to fears of their impending extinction. There was the Enumerators tendency to cut corners from an extremely unwieldy list by simply counting many households as belonging to forward castes in order to avoid having to look through the entire list for elusive caste names. What can be a solution for these kinds of problems? Could the Census replace the highly structured approach presently followed with a more flexible approach, in which households are asked to provide their caste identification
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that Enumerators could write down and then classify at the data entry phase? Not easy, and a potential classification nightmare. One possible strategy, says Desai, may be to adapt a form used in 2004 for industrial and occupational classification systems: called the National Classification of Occupations (NCO-04), the system contained the following hierarchical structure: Division (10), Subdivision (30), Group (116), Family (439), Occupations (2,945). Under this schema, a bidi furnace operator, for example, would be classified with a code 7,416.45, where the major division is seven (craft and related workers), subdivision is 74 (craft and related workers excluding metal workers, building workers and textile and printing workers), group is 741 (food processing and related workers), family is 7,416 (tobacco preparers), and occupation is 7,416.45 (bidi furnace operator). However, says Desai, if the respondent were to say that he engages in some highly specialised task within bidi preparation that is not included in the list (for example, counting and making bidi bundles), he could be classified as 7,416.90, or tobacco worker not elsewhere classified. A possible analogous process for caste could therefore be the following: you start with a list of jatis residing through the length and breadth of India, from NSS, NFHS, or other surveys, augmented from other sources where caste data are available, such as marriage advertisements, or lists of caste associations. This list could then be classified by anthropologists into some kind of classification schema, with sub-castes grouped within broader castes, and allowing space for the possibility of the Enumerator encountering a caste for which no predefined category is specified. Such a list should then be sorted by district. The Enumerator can therefore have two lists: one containing about 100 castes most frequently found in the district, and a second containing all castes found throughout India. Given the geographic clustering of castes and tribes in various regions of India, it seems likely that in about 80% of the cases, most respondents would find their caste within the first, shorter list: Garasias will only rarely be found in West Bengal but frequently in Gujarat and Rajasthan.
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Once such a classification list is developed, it could be tested through large nationwide sample surveys, and then possibly incorporated in the 2021 Census. Desai points out that if we dont start work on creating a full list of jatis and subjatis and including it into an enumeration system, we will not be ready even by 2021. Such a data structure clearly has advantages, in that it can work with relatively minute sub-classifications with relative ease. It does not however begin to address the question of elusive self-interest, or what Baxi wants: indices of deprivation that are consistent with respect and dignity of selfchosen identities of the respondents. If we are to produce a database that can properly handle the Caste Census, it would need to take on the larger question of identity as Baxi speaks of itcaste as potentially a valuable inheritance and thus an instrument of agency as against an imposition of a compulsory identity. Such an initiative could be a worthwhile object of any Unique Identity project, but there appears no evidence in the immediate future of any data resource even beginning to comprehend the technical problems of working with this level of ambiguous identity. We conclude by drawing attention to the fact that neither the NPRs database nor the AP Food & Civil Supplies Departments KYR-Plus database, the two that we have come across registering caste, have even begun attempting anything of the sort. KYR-Plus simply lists out SC, ST, BC, OC, and Others from a pull-down menu. And NPR does not even go that far.
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Stresspoint # 6: Data protection/how do I access and correct data about me: The danger of misuse: the danger of data theft. The possibility of targeting from a range of social interests. Is all this data safe? As Sruti Chaganti shows (Chapter 2) in her visits in Andhra Pradesh, although encryption was in place, the fact was that the data being collected was in at least three places. Sorting the data collected occurs when individual Aadhaar numbers and the data collected against them are aggregated into family units in the Registrars database. In the enrollment Centres she visited in Andhra Pradesh, common bar codes were attached to the acknowledgment forms of individual members of a family which were then used to sort family membership in the data retained for the use of the Registrar. Where a Registrar was a department implementing a social sector scheme, this aggregation of family membership was deemed necessary for its purposes, since the basic unit of all social security schemes is the family and not the individual. Thus, she writes: at least three copies of all data generated exist: one copy is sent to the UIDAI, one copy is sent to the Registrar and the third is maintained with the Enrolling Agency. While the UIDAIs Handbook for Registrars states that biometric data is to be encrypted upon collection to ensure their integrity and security, we understood from the enrollment centres we visited in AP that residents can ask for corrections in demographic data up to 48 hours after enrollment. When data is extracted for the UIDAI and the Registrar it is automatically encrypted: however, the system on which the enrollment took place appears to retain unencrypted data.
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This may be in itself a small issue but it certainly generates fears on the ground. It also links to the fact that India has been long criticised for its lack of data protection legislation, something that Rahul Matthan, a leading authority on data protection law, says makes for a significant weakness that would eventually stand in the way of serious offshore outsourcing to the country.27 Until 2008, the only provision that dealt with unauthorised access and damage to data was Section 43 of the Information Technology Act of 2000, which penalised any person who downloaded copies or extracted data from a computer system, introduced computer contaminants or viruses or damaged any data. In 2008, the government of India introduced a new section Sections 43-Awhich, Matthan argues, continues to have several insidious flaws that could affect the development of data protection jurisprudence in the country. While most international data protection statutes distinguish between levels of personal dataspecifying different forms of protection for personal information and sensitive personal information, the new IT Act makes no such distinction. Section 43-A applies to all sensitive personal data or information but does not specify how personal data, which is not deemed to be sensitive, is to be treated. This becomes a distinct issue in the instance of Aadhaar where, it is clear from the architecture outlined that the data would always be shared between Aadhaar itself and several key Registrars. Under most international data protection statutes, Matthan writes, the person in control of the data is liable for the consequences of disclosure, loss, or unauthorised access to such information. This ensures that liability is restricted to only those who actually have the ability to control the manner in which the data is used.However, under the new provisions of the IT Act, mere possession of information and its subsequent misuse would render any person who possesses this data liable to damages. In order to be a truly effective data protection statute, the IT Act 2008 must, he feels, include provisions relating to the collection, circumstances of collection, control, utilization, and proper disposal of data. Matthan then however goes on to make a somewhat curious argument for India.28 For at least the past decade, Indias governments have been collecting
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vast amounts of data about its residents, he says. Even though we are dealing with numbers far in excess of anything the Western world has had to handle, we face none of the personal privacy challenges that they suffer. For him the main reasonother than the standard chestnut that Indian society has no use for privacy as understood in the Westis the inaccuracy of the data being collected. For example, up to 20% of government databases could be ghosts persons who are registered within the database, but who do not actually exist. While the obvious effect is inefficiency in the distribution of public services, an unintended consequence is a lack of trust in the database itself. And so when agencies look to verify identity, they ask for multiple documents, to be doubly and triply sure that the person they are dealing with is who he claims he is. This copying strategy, made necessary by an inefficient data collection process, is what Matthan says has mainly protected us from data theft. Today, he writes, it is hard to steal identity in India, as the thief would need to obtain not just one, but many pieces of identity information. Aadhaar, therefore, as the most ambitious personal identification project ever attempted anywhere in the world, could well create an infrastructure through which public services will be directed more accurately to their intended recipientsand in the process create a new set of problems. By promising accurate and unique identity, it will allow us to rely on just one piece of identity information and thus will strip away the artificial protection that we have relied on all these years, laying us open to identity theft. Several related concerns around data privacy and theft have been echoed by other individuals as well as concerned NGO groups. The September 2010 signature campaign by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer et al is primarily pivoted on the privacy issue. While it is rumoured, says the petition, that the Department of Personnel and Training is working on a draft of a privacy law, nothing has yet been put out for discussion, and grave concerns exist on the technologys potential for surveillance, profiling, tracking, and the possibilities of people in power collating information about individuals. The Authority, says the petition, needs to have a clearly stated strategy on data theft, especially since key corporates such as Ernst & Young and Accenture may have access to such data. Confidentiality and data theft also concerns Jean Dreze, who
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accuses the Authority that its claim that the data will be safe with the Central Identities Data Repository is a half-truth, since the Authority can authorise any entity to maintain it, and as such the data can be accessed not only by intelligence agencies but also by any Ministry. But more important, the UID will help integrate vast amounts of personal data that are available to government agencies with few restrictions. How do I access my own data? How do I correct my data? One definite way forward is offered by the TAGUP (Technology Advisory Group on Unique Projects) Report published in early 2011 outlined a protocol for IT systems for what the government considered mission critical projects that possessed immense transformative power (to) change Indias growth trajectory. The purpose behind TAGUP was to find ways to rapidly roll out these complex systems, to achieve project objectives and sustain high levels of reliable performance: the focus being on Tax Information Network (TIN), New Pension Scheme (NPS), National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), the Expenditure Information Network (EIN), and the Goods and Service Tax (GST). TAGUP had fashioned its solution on the assembly of a National Information Utilities (NIU), a class of institutions that would be meant to handle all aspects of IT for complex governmental projects. It would be a clutch of private companies with a public purpose, making available essential infrastructure for public service. NIUs would compete for Government contracts, and the Government, as a paying customer, would be free to take its business from one NIU to another. Basically, an NIU would make available essential infrastructure for public service: for Government functions to be carried out efficiently, allowing feasible projects to be designed. While NIUs were defined mainly through a set of negationsthat they would NOT be the former State, but rather represent a new and benevolent governance that would directly radiate from the technology itself, no longer riddled by an absence of leadership, outdated recruitment processes, or an inability to pay market salaries for specialised skills. It should have total private ownership of at least 51%, with Governmental ownership at least 26%: and so, NIUs should compete for Government contracts, and the Government, as a paying
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customer, should be free to take its business from one NIU to another, if necessary. There are aspects to this that are both controversial and beyond the scope of the point being made here. What may be new here is the capacity of the concept to accommodate a democratic dimension of citizen self-interest, and, arising from that, to find a technological solution for the expression of that self-interest. So, in a chapter titled Openness, the TAGUP report says that the Government, as a producer of public goods, should release data in welldefined formats electronically, when possible, as prescribed by the Right to Information Act, 2005. This is not only being provided because people should have access to it as a right, but also because it could help innovative firms and individuals to combine various types of data to glean new information that may not have been possible from the individual datasets. Such data, importantly, would be both produced and received by the new citizen: so that citizens would suddenly be entities capable of having their say in the processes of this production. There is a need of a much greater scale of release of unencumbered data, placed into the public domain, of information created within Government. There can be economic data, map data, census data, pollution data, water data, soil quality data, climate data, PIN code data, administrative boundaries data, health data, Government accounts data, etc., which is released by the relevant ministries. Early international experiences of releasing open data using open file formats have resulted in mashups, which combine data from multiple sources and present it in ways that yield new insight, have been encouraging. While this too is in not, in itself a new concept, what is new here is the way citizens are envisaged as both recipients and producers of such data: further, as entities capable of having some say in the processes of this production. The system should therefore have a self-cleaning mechanism that is directly linked to citizen self-interest:
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The system (should be) self-cleaning, because it is in the residents interest to ensure that the system has correct data, in absence of which he cannot authenticate his own identity. (TIN has seen a gradual increase in data quality over time, as taxpayers realised the benefits of electronic filing and electronic payments). Further, clean data can be ensured by standardization of processes, matching and verifying information in workflows, simple and well defined open data formats, electronic payments and processing, instant feedback to customers, incentives for compliance, and penalization for non-compliance. It is through incentives that data quality can be managed, rather than micromanagement of stakeholders. There is considerable gloss on what are now named self-corrective forces derived from society itself: under the chapter titled Accountability, transparency, and self-corrective forces, the report claims that: A transparency portal for an IT project in Government works as a positive feedback loop. The fact that such a portal is implemented, means that analytics about the performance of the project are generated immediately. As a result, any deviation from expected behaviour is detected quickly and rectified. In case such a portal is not well thought out, potential problems may manifest themselves much later, and may turn out to be difficult to fix. A transparency portal leads to monitoring and feedback at various levels: within the service provider, within Government, and by citizens at large. A contact centre (therefore) closes the feedback loop of self-corrective forces. It establishes multiple channels of communication with all stakeholders, including end-users, for purposes of gathering information and reporting grievances. An effective contact centre is tightly integrated with the IT systems, so that queries and complaints can be dealt with effectively, and information is recorded and updated on a real-time basis. Some of the key features of such a contact centre are as follows: 1. Provide services in multiple languages
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2. Provide inbound channels of communication such as voice, fax, letters, e-mail, and a web portal 3. Provide outbound channels such as voice, fax, letter, e-mail, and SMS messages 4. Available during working hours, or on a 24-by-7 basis, depending upon the nature of the project 5. Deploy key technologies such as a Customer Relationship Management application (CRM), Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), call logging, quality management system, e-mail response system, and scanning solutions for letters and faxes. And arising from this, the new emphasis on crowd-sourcing as a direct feature of e-democracy: Enabling citizens and beneficiaries of public schemes to directly provide feedback using web and mobile phone-based platforms is a powerful way of involving citizens in improving public accountability. It unlocks the potential of collective wisdom. In addition, the ability to combine spatial and financial data can provide very powerful maps to track the progress of various initiatives and schemes. Among the other schemes of Government, according to TAGUP, to use successful crowd-sourcing means are the Ushahidi, Transparent Chennai, Environment Sustainability Index, Pollution Index, and e-Governments foundation projects.
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Interestingly, Openness does not always include open source: while Open Data, it is recommended, should use open source operating systems wherever possible, there was need to recognise that the NIU would have to have intellectual property over its source codes and that it may be counterproductive to the business planning and profitability of the NIU to release all source code as open source.
BIbLIOGRAPHY
Targeting in Theory, Business Standard, December 08, 2005, http://www.businessstandard.com/india/news/targeting-in-theory/231031/. Baxi, Upendra, Caste Census and Constitutional Justice, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. xlv no. 37, September 11, 2010, pp. 25-28. Bhalla, A.S., Can High Technology Help Third World Take-Off?, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 22, No. 27 (Jul. 4, 1987), pp. 1082-1086. Desai, Nitin, Put the Last Mile First, Business Standard Oct 21, 2004. Desai, Sonalde, Caste and Census: A Forward Looking Strategy, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. xlv no. 29, July 17, 2010, pp. 10-13. Deshpande, Satish and Mary E. John, The Politics of Not Counting Caste, Economic & Political Weekly, June 19, 2010 vol. xlv no. 25, pp 39-42. Dreze, Jean, Unique Facility, Or Recipe For Trouble?, The Hindu, November 25, 2010 (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article911055.ece). Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011 (draft), http://deity.gov.in/content/draftelectronic-delivery-services-bill-2011. Ghosh, Atig, (ed) Branding the Migrant: Arguments of Rights, Welfare and Security, Kolkata: Frontpage, 2013. Himanshu and Abhijit Sen, Who not a Universal Food Security Legislation?, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 46 No. 12, March 19 - March 25, 2011, pp. 38-47. Kapur, Devesh, Partha Mukhopadhyay, and Arvind Subramanian, More for the Poor and Less for and by the State: The Case for Direct Cash Transfers. Economic and Political Weekly, April 12, 2008 http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/ subramanian0408b.pdf. Matthan, Rahul Matthan, Privacy Bill a must to strengthen Aadhaar, Livemint November 24, 2010. http://www.livemint.com/2010/11/24223047/Privacy-Bill-a-mustto-strengt.html. Matthan, Rahul, http://www.rahulmatthan.com/category/information-technology/ accessed Jan 1, 2011.
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Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, My Caste and I, Indian Express, May 12, 2010 http:// antireservation2007.sulekha.com/blog/post/2010/05/my-caste-and-i-pratapbhanu-mehta.htm. National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, A cost-benefit analysis of Aadhaar, November 2012. http://macrofinance.nipfp.org.in/FILES/uid_cba_paper.pdf. Natraj, V.K., Why the Census Should Not Count Caste, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. xlv no. 31, July 31, 2010, pp. 79-80. Nilekani, Nandan, Imagining India: Ideas for a New Century, New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. Pandey, Brijesh, Natgrid will kick in from May 2011. Is the big brother threat for real?, Tehelka Magazine, Vol. 7, Issue 45, Dated November 13, 2010. Ramanathan, Usha, A State Of Surveillance, International Environmental Law Research Centre, 2010. (http://www.ielrc.org/content/w1002.pdf). Ramanathan, Usha, Implications of registering, tracking, profiling, The Hindu, April 5, 2010 (http://www.hindu.com/2010/04/05/stories/2010040554240800.htm). Ramanthan, Usha, A Unique Identity Bill, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. xlv no. 30 July 24, 2010. Sanjay, B.P ., The Role of Institutional Relationships in Communication Technology Transfer: A Case Study of the Indian National Satellite System (INSAT), Ph.D. Dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 1989. Sen, Amartya, The Political Economy of Targeting, http://adatbank.transindex.ro/html/ cim_pdf384.pdf. UIDAI, Creating a Unique Identity Number for Every Resident in India, 2009, http:// www.comp.polyu.edu.hk/conference/iceb/content/doc/UIDAI.pdf.
NOTES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Ghosh (ed.) 2013. UIDAI, 2009, hereafter UID Working Paper http://www.comp.polyu.edu.hk/conference/iceb/content/ doc/UIDAI.pdf. See Sanjay, 1989. Bhalla, 1987, pp. 1082-1086. Nilekani, 2008. Draft Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011, http://deity.gov.in/content/draft-electronic-deliveryservices-bill-2011. Nitin Desai, former advisor to the Finance Ministry, alerts us to some of the problems we could face: Much of public discussion is on the perceived difference between India and other developing countries, particularly in Asia. The cry is for what is described as world-class infrastructure that can support the rapidly growing aspirations of the urban middle class with their cars, refrigerators, airconditioners, shopping malls and air travel. More broadly the focus is on mega projects for urban transportation, highways, skyscrapers, large ports, and power projects. For example, in a recent online article, an adviser to FICCI expresses his anguish at
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the absence in India of anything comparable to the spectacular bits of infrastructure he saw in East and South-East Asia. He then asks for 50 major expressways, 100 key bridges, a dozen airports, five key ports and logistic hubs, ten world-class cities with services that compare with the best in the world, 100 new townships, 20 convention centers, 30 mega power projects etc. Is he aware of the fact that the exorbitant cost and poor economics of these showpiece investments were some of the factors behind the 1997 financial crisis? India Inc. needs better infrastructure for energy, supply chain management, and communications. This requires investment in power, roads, and ICT for productive purposes. But industry itself must understand that their future depends also on the last mile and that a substantial improvement there will open huge new opportunities for them. In some areas like telecom, where new technologies have opened up new options, this is working. In others we are still to see results. Private investment is not the magic wand that will spirit away the demons of inefficiency and lack of access. It will go to prosperous areas and lucrative applications where capacity utilisation and chargeable tariffs can lead to high returns. But the poorer areas will need to be served and even with service obligations in private licenses, much of the burden falls on the public sector. The untidy cohabitation of the public and the private does not really solve the problem of the last mile (Desai, Put the Last Mile First, 2004). 8 Dreze writes: That the UID is, in effect, going to be compulsory is clear from many other documents. For instance, the Planning Commission's proposal for the National Food Security Act argues for mandatory use of UID numbers which are expected to become operational by the end of 2010 (note the optimistic time-frame). No UID, no food. Similarly, UIDAI's concept note on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) assumes that each citizen needs to provide his UID before claiming employment. Thus, Aadhaar will also be a condition for the right to workso much for its voluntary nature (Dreze 2010: http://www.thehindu.com/ opinion/op-ed/article911055.ece). 9 The plan, according to newspaper reports, is that from May 2011, the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) will integrate 21 existing databases with Central and state government agencies and other organisations in the public and private sector such as banks, insurance companies, stock exchanges, airlines, railways, telecom service providers, chemical vendors, etc. Eleven government agencies (including RAW, Intelligence Bureau, Revenue Intelligence, Income Tax, etc.) will be able to access sensitive personal information of any individualsuch as bank accounts, insurance policies, property owned or rented, travel, income tax returns, driving records, automobiles owned or leased, credit card transactions, stock market trades, phone calls, emails and SMSes, websites visited, etc. A National Population Registry will be established by the 2011 Census, during which fingerprints and iris scans would be taken along with GPS records of each household. According to the home ministry, the Central intelligence agencies and state police have plenty of information that is not shared or because there is no umbrella organisation to collate all the information, which any or all the agencies can share to generate real-time intelligence. The Natgrid enables quick extraction of information, data mining, pattern recognition and flagging tripwires of suspicious or unusual activities (Pandey, 2010). Also see Ramanathan, 2010. 10 Arguing for the CCTNS, Chidambaram is quoted as saying that the police stations in the country are, today, virtually unconnected islands. Thanks to telephones and wireless, and especially thanks to mobile telephones, there is voice connectivity between the police station and senior police officers, but that is about all. There is no system of data storage, data sharing and accessing data. There is no system under which one police station can talk to another directly. There is no record of crimes or criminals that can be accessed by a Station House Officer, except the manual records relating to that police station. The goals of the proposed CCTNS are to facilitate collection, storage, retrieval,
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analysis, transfer and sharing of data and information at the police station and between the police station and the State Headquarters and the Central Police Organisations (http://ncrb.nic.in/cctns. htm). 11 Chidambaram is quoted as saying, at the 22nd Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment lecture in December 2009 that such a Centre would be started by end-2010, that 247 police control rooms would be set up in all districts. The NCTC was effectively conceived after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist arrack (26/11), but has found widespread opposition from State governments, who have argued that the kinds of sweeping powers that a Central agency is meant to have violates the autonomy of state governments, given that law and order is a state subject according to the Constitution. The initial opposition to the NCTC has also focused on how the agency had been empowered to search and arrest people without keeping the state government, police or anti-terror squad in the loop. 12 As listed in the Census of India website FAQs, the NPR will work like this: it will gather details such as Name, Date of Birth, Sex, Present Address, Permanent Address, Names of Father, Mother and Spouse etc by visiting each and every household. All usual residents (phrase in original) will be eligible to be included irrespective of their Nationality. Each and every household will be given an Acknowledgement Slip at the time of enumeration. The data will then be entered into computers in the local language of the State as well as in English. Once this database has been created, biometrics such as photograph, 10 fingerprints and probably Iris information will be added for all persons aged 15 years and above. This will be done by arranging camps at every village and at the ward level in every town. Each household will be required to bring the Acknowledgement Slip to such camps. Those who miss these camps will be given the opportunity to present themselves at permanent NPR Centres to be set up at the Tehsil/Town level. In the next step, data will be printed out and displayed at prominent places within the village and ward for the public to see. Objections will be sought and registered at this stage. Each of these objections will then be enquired into by the local Revenue Department Officer and a proper disposal given in writing. Persons aggrieved by such order have a right of appeal to the Tehsildar and then to the District Collector. Once this process is over, the lists will be placed in the Gram Sabha in villages and the Ward Committee in towns. Claims and Objections will be received at this stage also and dealt with in the same manner described above. The Gram Sabha/Ward Committee has to give its clearance or objection within a fixed period of time after which it will be deemed that the lists have been cleared. The lists thus authenticated will then be sent to the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) for de-duplication and issue of UID Numbers. All duplicates will be eliminated at this stage based on comparison of biometrics. Unique ID numbers will also be generated for every person. The cleaned database along with the UID Number will then be sent back to the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India (ORG&CCI) and would form the National Population Register. As the UID system works on the basis of biometric de-duplication, in the case of persons of age 15 years and above (for whom biometrics is available), the UID Number will be available for each individual. For those below the age of 15 years (for whom biometrics is not available), the UID Number will be linked to the parent or guardian. (http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-FAQ/FAQ-Public.html#B). 13 http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-Documents/citizenship_rules2003.pdf. 14 Ramanthan, A Unique Identity Bill, 2010, pp. 12. 15 Sen, The Political Economy of Targeting, http://adatbank.transindex.ro/html/cim_pdf384.pdf. 16 Himanshu and Abhijit Sen, 2011, pp. 38-47. 17 Brief history of issues by Himanshyu and Sen: The PDS was universal in 1993-94 but targeted in 2004-05, and NSS data for these years show what happened to leakages. In 1993-94, leakage in rice was 19% which increased to 40% in 2004-05; in wheat, it went up from 41% to 73% and for rice and wheat together, it increased from 28% in 1993-94 to 54% in 2004-05. Per capita per month consumption of PDS rice and wheat remained unchanged (0.99 kg in 1993-94 and 1.01 kg
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in 2004-05) although PDS offtake doubled and subsidy increased even more. If feasibility is judged on the ability to stabilise food prices and in terms of physical and financial leakage, as the RC does, the targeted PDS scores very poorly against the universal PDS by past official assessments. 18 Despite criticisms such as these which have been voiced since the early 2000s, the Government has sought to expand targeting to include, in 2005, dual pricing schemes for kerosene, power and even for petrol, with Indian Oil Corporation proposing cheaper petrol and dedicated pumps for twowheelers. Targeting in Theory, Business Standard, December 08, 2005, http://www.businessstandard.com/india/news/targeting-in-theory/231031/ 19 Kapur, Mukhopadhyay, subramanian0408b.pdf. and Subramanian, http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/
20 National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, 2012. http://macrofinance.nipfp.org.in/FILES/uid_ cba_paper.pdf. 21 Mehta, 2010, http://antireservation2007.sulekha.com/blog/post/2010/05/my-caste-and-ipratap-bhanu-mehta.htm. 22 Baxi, 2010, pp. 25-28. 23 Natraj, 2010, pp. 79-80. 24 Letter published in The Hindu on August 13, 2010, by Dr. M. Vijayanunni, Former Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, Justice M.N. Rao, Chairperson, National Commission for the Backward Classes, Prof. Sukhadeo Thorat, Chairperson, University Grants Commission, Prof. Satish Deshpande, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Prof. Yogendra Yadav, Political Scientist, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Prof. S. Japhet, Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion, National Law School of India, Bengaluru, Dr. Chandan Gowda, Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion, National Law School of India, Bengaluru, Prof. Valerian Rodrigues, Political Scientist, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Ravi Varma Kumar, Senior Advocate and former Chairperson, Karnataka Backward Classes Commission. http://www.thehindu.com/ opinion/op-ed/article568602.ece. 25 Deshpande and John, 2010, pp. 39-42. 26 Desai, 2010, pp. 10-13. 27 http://www.rahulmatthan.com/category/information-technology/ accessed Jan 1, 2011. 28 Matthan, 2010. http://www.livemint.com/2010/11/24223047/Privacy-Bill-a-must-to-strengt.html
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In the Wake of Aadhaar

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