In 2008, Nandan Nilekani published a book titled Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century. Most people will have read the book, since it has continually been on bestseller lists. There was a section in that book titled “Getting rid of our phantoms: single citizen ID”. This section said, “India’s ministries and departments are also quite isolated, with separate fund flows and intricate, over-hyphenated authority levels. As a result these systems require paperwork-choked processes each time citizens approach the state... Creating a national register of citizens, assigning them a unique ID and linking them across a set of national databases, like the PAN and passport, can have far-reaching effects in delivering public services better and targeting services more accurately. Unique identification for each citizen also ensures a basic right — the right to ‘an acknowledged existence’ in the country, without which much of a nation’s poor can be nameless and ignored, and governments can draw a veil over large-scale poverty and destitution... No one else can then claim a benefit that is rightfully yours, and no one can deny their economic status, whether abjectly poor or extremely wealthy... A key piece of infrastructure that must sit on top of an interconnected grid is the electronic flow of funds... Linking smart cards to such accounts can open up the banking system to hundreds of millions more people.”

What a great idea. This is not just financial inclusion, it is citizen inclusion too. And from the point of view of security, it is non-citizen exclusion. The president thought it was a great idea too, that is, government suggested she think it was a great idea. Paragraph 13 of her June 4 speech to Parliament stated, “The Unique Identity Card scheme for each citizen will be implemented in three years overseen by an Empowered Group. This would serve the purpose of identification for development programmes and security.” Some Cassandras did wonder about paragraph 32 of the same speech, where it said, “Targeted identification cards would subsume and replace omnibus Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. NREGA has a job card and the proposed Food Security Act would also create a new card.” How many cards were there going to be?

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