The Union Budget is to be presented today, and there is every expectation that the UPA, which interprets its victory as a mandate in favour of expanding and deepening social sector schemes, will announce that as being one of the government’s spending priorities over the next year. In particular, the rollout of the National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, now generally considered a success, has given rise to the theory that rights-based government intervention successfully transfers some power and agency to their beneficiary — and thus hopes for streamlining the Public Distribution System, among others, rest on similar transformations. While this is a powerful argument, it is important to note that without working simultaneously on more effective and politically empowering targeting — which also makes the system less easy to subvert — any new “rights”, and the financial support for fulfilling them, might well prove to be dangerously fragile as well as insufficiently accessible.

It is necessary, therefore, to keep the argument in favour of a unified ID system in mind. It has the potential to revolutionise the delivery of government spending and greatly increase the effectiveness of every individual rupee — and thus, possibly, greatly ease the competing claims on future finance ministers drafting future budgets.

There are, of course, concerns that even a well-funded and capably-headed project could go nowhere, that the issue of unique IDs will be so tied up with bureaucratic red tape that it will be nowhere near as universal as it would need to be, and that it would be as hostage to local tough-guy politics as ration and BPL cards are currently. These are concerns that should, indeed, be repeatedly aired. They need not, however paralyse the project, but instead galvanise it. These are the hurdles that this, the largest IT project in history, will need to clear. Many in the new India have looked to the extraordinary march of technology over the past few decades as a potential saviour. These next crucial years are those in which their hopes will either be realised, and the age-old demons mentioned again by nay-sayers exorcised; or in which such optimism will be proved illusory. Few things could be more certain than that it is an attempt worth making.