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Business News/ Politics / News/  Resident ID project clears Aadhaar roadblock
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Resident ID project clears Aadhaar roadblock

Resident ID project clears Aadhaar roadblock

In the clear: A file photo of an Aadhaar pilot project. RIC was first launched in India’s coastal states after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintPremium

In the clear: A file photo of an Aadhaar pilot project. RIC was first launched in India’s coastal states after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint

New Delhi: Starting next year, every Indian resident will be given a multi-purpose identity card, with the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) giving its clearance to the home ministry’s ambitious scheme against the objections of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and department of electronics and information technology (DeitY) over verification and other issues.

The home ministry-backed Resident Identity Card (RIC), which will bear the UIDAI’s 12-digit Aadhaar (or unique identification) number, can be used for verifying identity as well as the delivery of various government programmes including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY), the public distribution system, and electoral and other financial services.

In the clear: A file photo of an Aadhaar pilot project. RIC was first launched in India’s coastal states after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint

The EFC, which met for the third time on the issue because of differences within the government, on Thursday approved around 5,500 crore for the project and ruled against the objections raised by the Nandan Nilekani-led UIDAI and DeitY. UIDAI has already issued 180 million Aadhar numbers to the country’s residents.

The EFC usually doesn’t take more than one meeting to arrive at a decision. But after objections from UIDAI and DeitY, Sumit Bose, then expenditure secretary and on Sunday named to the revenue department, appointed a technical committee to examine whether the scope of the RIC scheme could be expanded.

The committee was formed in the last week of April under B.K. Gairola, director general of the National Informatics Centre. The other members included representatives from the Registrar General of India, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, the department of financial services, the Election Commission and the labour ministry.

“The technical committee was appointed with terms and reference to check the feasibility of the RIC in other sectors. The committee gave a go-ahead in the EFC meeting," said a government official, who declined to be identified. “We will now start issuing of RIC from March next year onwards." Another official independently confirmed the above.

Home ministry officials visited Malaysia last month to understand how its multi-purpose smart identification card, MyKad, worked. The card incorporates multiple applications with several sets of personal information about the holder.

The RIC programme was first launched in India’s nine coastal states after the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. The home ministry wanted to extend the scheme to the rest of the country and had sought 6,790 crore to fund the programme. The smart card uses a chip that carries data, photographs and fingerprints. The home ministry has been projecting RIC as a national identity card.

The scheme ran into trouble after it faced stiff opposition from UIDAI chairman Nilekani and DeitY.

They objected to RIC’s offline verification process and the cost of the project.

Their objections appear to have stemmed from the bitter and all-too-public battle between the home ministry and UIDAI over the Aadhaar project overlapping, in some aspects, with the National Population Register (NPR) project. A compromise was finally reached on 27 January that allowed the scope of UIDAI’s project to be expanded to 600 million people and seemingly prevented duplication in the collection of biometric information. NPR, being put together by the census department that comes under the home ministry, will form the basis of the RIC project.

sahil.m@livemint.com

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Published: 06 Aug 2012, 11:45 AM IST
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