All-in-one ID card, The Indian Express, 4 April 1998

All-in-one ID card

 

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One of the first major announcements to come from the Union Home Minister is about equipping all citizens with identity cards. It is evidently a matter of prime concern for L.K. Advani. He has already discussed ways of implementing it with Home Ministry officials and believes it is feasible to issue cards to people in border areas in the first instance and then gradually to everyone else in the country.Although it is clear that the internal security aspect is one of the central concerns here, Advani confined himself at his Press conference to pointing out how the new ID cards would make life simpler for people. A multi-purpose ID card, as distinct from the voter-identity card issued at great expense in 1995 and 1996 at T.N. Seshan's insistence, will be little compendium of authenticated data about oneself drawn from a government computer. As Advani explained, it will not only confirm the holder's voting rights, it will contain the kind of personal information people are required to furnish about themselvesfrom time to time such as age, caste etc. It will also help in widening the tax net.
A massive exercise like this, with a billion individual identities being established by the time the process is completed, requires great care in the conception of the scheme and in its implementation. Exactly what will be the minimum essential and desirable data on each card keeping in mind citizens' rights and needs as well as raisons d'etat has yet to be thrashed out. Why, for example, must caste affiliation be an essential feature? One hopes Advani will elaborate on his ideas before too long. From the security angle there are no two ways about the usefulness of ID cards especially in the states of the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir where cross-border infiltration has reached menacing proportions and illegal immigration is damaging the social and political fabric. But although the need is great to distinguish citizens from non-citizens, there are grey areas that will not yield to simple solutions. There cannot be anarbitrary, one-rule-fits-all answer. Central and State governments in the Northeast will have to apply their minds to the question of where certain categories of residents stand.
Many have ration cards and voter identity cards but are considered illegal immigrants according to other yardsticks. Others like the Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh are regarded by the Centre as refugees deserving full citizenship rights but have not been accorded them by the State government. So, handle with care.
From the citizen's point of view it will be convenient in all sorts of official and private dealings to have one document to produce instead of several as at present. As citizens of all economically advanced countries and their governments have found, social security or ID cards are a basic necessity. But in India the notion of an all-in-one ID card has, for good reason, never been wildly popular. It is partly the fear of harassment or misuse by officialdom, partly because for millions of poor people having a fixedidentity is not an obvious advantage. The BJP government particularly needs to assuage all these fears in order to win the people's cooperation in its efforts.Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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