Multi-benefits

Home Minister P. Chidambarams announcement that a multi-purpose national identity card (MNIC) will be available from 2011 is welcome. The National Population Register,to be compiled in a couple of years,will provide a comprehensive list of Indians,who will then be given unique numbers. The origin of the MNIC goes back to 2002,to the NDA regimes desire to curb illegal migration from Bangladesh. The UPA also established pilot projects to test this,but the idea meandered until 26/11,when a jolted Centre realised that a single all-purpose identity card was a must for national security. The home ministers announcement seems to be driven by internal security considerations.

While the smart chip-enabled MNIC will certainly make policing easier,to focus solely on this is a waste of an opportunity. Indias leaky welfare schemes leak all the more because a sheaf of ID cards from PAN to ration to electoral overlap,are poorly distributed,and are often fudged. Worse,since most of these cards require home addresses,Indias many illegal squatters,slum-dwellers,not to mention millions of workers in the informal economy,remain beyond the reach of these cards. The MNIC,based on an exhaustive population census,could bring these invisibles onto master rolls and ensure that pro-poor measures are better targeted. This is all the more important given that the Congress,spurred by the belief that its public works scheme was a vote-winner in the just concluded elections,has already announced a slew of new welfare schemes. The large public monies flowing through government pipes will need an identified tap at the end. The data already collected by the government through the NREGA and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan must be incorporated into the NPR to ensure that the MNIC is based on tip-top data. The MNIC will then have enough credibility to entirely replace the current pack.

That its security value will overshadow the MNICs more benign use leads to another worry the possible misuse by an overbearing security apparatus. It is one thing for a national identity card to help prevent terror attacks,quite another for permanent check points to insist that crossers produce ID cards as a matter of routine. There is a fine line between a well-policed state and,well,a police state.