3 meetings- A Report By Vickram Crishna
The first meeting was in Pune, on the 19th, organised by Open Spaces, an NGO that actively hosts public meetings on issues of common concern. It was held with the kind participation of Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, part of the (deemed) Symbiosis University.
There were 5 panelists, Dr Usha Ramanathan, Prof.R.Ramkumar, Prof JG Krishnayya of the Systems Research Institute in Pune, widely acknowledged as the 'father' of e-Governance in India, Prof Lalit Kathpalia, the director of the Institute, and myself.
The panel was moderated by Anupam Saraph, the CIO of Pune city. It was well attended, with about 50 people present, including students, mediapersons and general public.
About the other panelists:
Prof Krishnayya has run the Systems Research Institute in Pune for decades, and this was Mr Narayanamurthy's first workplace, before he left to start Infosys with Mr Nilekani and 5 others (this link - from a news report published on 21 Jan about a function held to felicitate Prof Krishnayya's 75th birthday, is interesting, as it hints at the relationship between the Infosys founders and Prof Krishnayya).
Prof Kathpalia has joined academia after about 23 years in the IT sector, including 5 years with Infosys.
Mr Saraph began by introducing the UID project, a subject close to his heart as he has been running an 'identity' project in Pune city, aimed at assisting its migrant population, since his appointment 3 years back.
As he informed us, Mr Nilekani, whom he also knows personally, was briefed about the existence of this project as soon as he was appointed, but has failed entirely to take note of it or to interact with Mr Saraph. One of the initiative's chief characteristics is its lack of dependence on a central database, and the second is its entirely voluntary (opt-in) nature. The objective has been to help Pune migrant residents get bank accounts etc in the absence of the documents specified by the Reserve Bank of India's 'Know Your Customer' norms, and flowing from this, other services, as needed, from government agencies (bank accounts that remain unauthenticated under the KYC protocol are frozen, and fresh applications will not be sanctioned without meeting KYC norms). He placed the UIDAI project inception around 2003, but see Prof Ramkumar's observation below, which Mr Saraph later also accepted.
Mr Kathpalia expressed the belief that a central identity authenticating service was essential to ironing out the kinks in delivery of public services, especially subsidies, in which leakages are felt to severely damage effectiveness, despite the vast budgets. He also indicated that Mr Nilekani's track record in Infosys was a good precedent for a big project.
Prof Krishnayya described the Indian demographic scenario, which broadly divides the country into three very large groups. The Urban sector lives in vary large cities, the Semi-urban in smaller cities, and the Rural lives in villages and hamlets with less than 3,000 residents, typically very widely dispersed. The design of public services delivery must take into account the very different conditions each of these geographical dispersals impose on systems, but this has largely been lacking, he feels. The needs of people in each of these three groups are also very different, and it is difficult to imagine a single solution that can possibly serve each of them equitably. In fact, the attempt to create single solutions, that principally ease channels of administration, rather than focus on end-point service deliveries, is a feature of failed government programs.
Usha laid out several procedural problems with the project, beginning with the fact that it has been undertaken without even a feasibility study. This lacuna, which might conceivably be a key part of Mr Nilekani's objective of driving the project ahead at all speed, is being dealt with by using each of its initial phases as opportunities for streamlining. However, problems being thrown up are being wilfully ignored, defeating the purpose of streamlining, especially as they indicate the presence of deep structural and conceptual flaws in Mr Nilekani's vision (which was expressed in a book he published at the end of 2008, Imagining India, believed to be the reason the Indian Prime Minister invited him to head the project). She has also personally witnessed enrollment processes of migrant workers in Delhi, and observed appalling compromises, with lack of oversight and training resulting in callous disregard of the existing identity information gathered by migrant workers for themselves.
Ramkumar described his interactions with Mr Nilekani at the project 'definition' stage, at a retreat attended by senior government officials. He is convinced that Mr Nilekani is now completely impervious to suggestions that this project is flawed, including serious problems with his grasp of the root problems of delivery of public services. This may not even be the purpose of the project, which Ramkumar's research has revealed (and which he has published several times in the mainstream media) is rooted in the Kargil war, a border skirmish with Pakistan in 1999, following which the then government (now in the opposition) proposed to issue the Multipurpose National Identity Card to border residents, evidently to prevent infiltration by undercover militants.
A secondary purpose was to stem illegal immigration, most significantly from Bangladesh, which shares a very large land border with India. The issues of foreign militants and immigrants are a popular topic to drum up political support, most typically by right-wing political ideologists, and hardly ever countered by political thinkers representing other viewpoints. The trouble with MNIC or any other such card concepts is that the Census Act specifically protects the privacy of censused people, thus this database is inaccessible for the purpose of issuing citizen identity cards. To get around this, the Citizenship Act of 1955 was amended in 2004 to enable the creation of the National Population Register, a database of Indian citizens. The exercise is to kick off this year, 2011, by using census data collection staffers to 'double up' as NPR data gatherers, thus bypassing the privacy provisions of the Census Act.
The present talk of social service delivery is arguably a smokescreen to cover the underlying 'national security' need. In fact, it is very convenient to ease the covert exit of direct government participation in services delivery, substituting this with an outsourcing model with which Mr Nilekani is well familiar, having helped build Infosys' commercial business on just this basis. This also explains the significant lack of public discussion, as this is a very radical policy change, likely to be highly contentious. The 'right-wing' political parties that formerly led the government, under whose administration this card project was initiated, is clearly hardly interested in opening up this debate into a public interlocution. The lack of even an Ordinance to temporarily legitimise UIDAI is clear when one understands that such an ordinance would have to be ratified in the following session of Parliament, which would entail public debate.
I basically spoke about the technology issues relating to the implementation of this project, ending with a summary of its project management flaws. Primarily: biometric information, both fingerprints and iris scanned, is completely unknown and largely unresearched as a tool for use in unique identification. While iris scanning is pretty new, about a decade or so, fingerprints have been used to identify repeat offenders by police forces around the world. Unfortunately, the future of this is now in severe doubt, as court cases in the US have revealed that the procedures are fundamentally flawed. iris scanning is akin to airport bodyscanning, in that the processes are being put in place in various places around the world, without any scientific basis or reason to believe that they are valid or foolproof, while being fundamentally an extreme invasion of personal space (in the case of bodyscanning, also invasive in terms of potentially hazardous radiation exposure). About project management, the lack of a preliminary feasibility study, resulting in a project taking off without a tightly designed process, serious flaws in the process design, including a flagrant lack of process audit during enrollment, the current phase, and the lack of infrastructure to take advantage of 'voluntarily' proffered PII (personal identification information) to assure tailored delivery of public services. As all these things are supposedly 'in the pipeline', the overall design of this project seems to be in the risky Ready, Shoot, Aim style, with 'problems' being 'taken care of' in due course (the 'quotes' are actual words and phrases used by Mr Nilekani in several interviews).
At the end, Prof Kathpalia summed up by reiterating the project management flaws and criticising the approach adopted for pursuing this project, which was a fairly notable reversal of his original thesis.
I have gone into some detail here, as the next two meetings, with different audiences in Mumbai on Saturday, covered much of the same ground, excepting that I was not myself a featured speaker or panelist. Instead, our listmember, JT D'Souza, a biometrics expert, whose core business is biometrics-based access control systems for secure locations, demonstrated how simple it is to spoof fingerprints, using extremely cheap commonplace materials and a little ingenuity. He pointed out that such access control systems work very well where they are backed up by supplementary surveillance systems - CCTV, armed guards etc, none of which are conceivably possible for millions of fair price shops and rural worksites where public subsidy programmes interface with citizens. Hopefully, videos of this demonstration will soon be available online, but this depends on Kamayani being able to complete uploading the large files soon. This is quite important, as it seems The Hindu journalist missed the point of the demonstration entirely - at least the other reporters, from DNA and HT, got it right. JTD demonstrated that is it quite trivial, and ridiculously inexpensive, to spoof a fingerprint scanning system - and not a fingerprint scanner that accepts false fingerprints. In fact, his demo device is a scanner that is very similar to the scanners ordered by UIDAI, and which he supplies regularly to clients needing access control systems for their workplaces.
The first meeting was held in St Xavier's, the well-known South Mumbai college. It was primarily for students, and the meeting hall was packed with students from the Economics, Sociology and Mass Media faculties. I do hope they follow up by publishing blogposts right away - they have a formal newsletter, but it has a monthly schedule. The post-presentation interaction was also very lively. One student, Joseph, had actually done an economics field internship last year studying the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna process, intended to benefit rural and disempowered workers, but which has all the hallmarks of similar disregard for the basics.
I must mention here that the main college hall had an ongoing exhibition of student work, one of which was a poster displaying the Fundamental Rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India, which unaccountably omitted mentioning the rights to free speech, life and liberty (the latter having been held by the Supreme Court to include privacy), and which I pointed out to our student hosts.
The second meeting was for the press, held in the Press Club, Mumbai, a favoured location for non-PR (ie not commercially sponsored) events here. It has resulted already in two news reports in Hindustan Times & DNA from Mumbai city, and another from the Hindu in Chennai. All these links have been posted to this group separately.
An important addition at this last meeting was pointing out the dubious connection between this project and L-1 Identity Systems, a US based company awarded the job of de-duplication, despite
1. its spotty record with other government bodies such as the New York State DMV, which slammed it (as its former corporate identity, Viisage) for validating forged driving licenses,
and 2. its links with US intelligence and security agencies, exemplified by the large number of former senior employees hired regularly upon retirement, including George Tenet, the CIA chief who furnished falsified data for presentation in the United Nations for sanctions against Iraq, that resulted in the current situation in that country.
One hopes that some of the media takes note of this contractor's presence, one that ought to raise alerts at the highest levels.
The Mumbai meetings, especially the Press Club, are thanks to Kamayani, who has worked very hard to ensure that this awareness initiative, with its primary focus on students, gained a decent amount of press coverage.
There were a number of journalists from non-English language publications present, but so far I am not aware of stories carried in any other publications. As we all know, the extent of financial muscle behind UIDAI's publicity drive is an enormous disincentive to publishers to present a balanced picture.
--
Vickram
There were 5 panelists, Dr Usha Ramanathan, Prof.R.Ramkumar, Prof JG Krishnayya of the Systems Research Institute in Pune, widely acknowledged as the 'father' of e-Governance in India, Prof Lalit Kathpalia, the director of the Institute, and myself.
The panel was moderated by Anupam Saraph, the CIO of Pune city. It was well attended, with about 50 people present, including students, mediapersons and general public.
About the other panelists:
Prof Krishnayya has run the Systems Research Institute in Pune for decades, and this was Mr Narayanamurthy's first workplace, before he left to start Infosys with Mr Nilekani and 5 others (this link - from a news report published on 21 Jan about a function held to felicitate Prof Krishnayya's 75th birthday, is interesting, as it hints at the relationship between the Infosys founders and Prof Krishnayya).
Prof Kathpalia has joined academia after about 23 years in the IT sector, including 5 years with Infosys.
Mr Saraph began by introducing the UID project, a subject close to his heart as he has been running an 'identity' project in Pune city, aimed at assisting its migrant population, since his appointment 3 years back.
As he informed us, Mr Nilekani, whom he also knows personally, was briefed about the existence of this project as soon as he was appointed, but has failed entirely to take note of it or to interact with Mr Saraph. One of the initiative's chief characteristics is its lack of dependence on a central database, and the second is its entirely voluntary (opt-in) nature. The objective has been to help Pune migrant residents get bank accounts etc in the absence of the documents specified by the Reserve Bank of India's 'Know Your Customer' norms, and flowing from this, other services, as needed, from government agencies (bank accounts that remain unauthenticated under the KYC protocol are frozen, and fresh applications will not be sanctioned without meeting KYC norms). He placed the UIDAI project inception around 2003, but see Prof Ramkumar's observation below, which Mr Saraph later also accepted.
Mr Kathpalia expressed the belief that a central identity authenticating service was essential to ironing out the kinks in delivery of public services, especially subsidies, in which leakages are felt to severely damage effectiveness, despite the vast budgets. He also indicated that Mr Nilekani's track record in Infosys was a good precedent for a big project.
Prof Krishnayya described the Indian demographic scenario, which broadly divides the country into three very large groups. The Urban sector lives in vary large cities, the Semi-urban in smaller cities, and the Rural lives in villages and hamlets with less than 3,000 residents, typically very widely dispersed. The design of public services delivery must take into account the very different conditions each of these geographical dispersals impose on systems, but this has largely been lacking, he feels. The needs of people in each of these three groups are also very different, and it is difficult to imagine a single solution that can possibly serve each of them equitably. In fact, the attempt to create single solutions, that principally ease channels of administration, rather than focus on end-point service deliveries, is a feature of failed government programs.
Usha laid out several procedural problems with the project, beginning with the fact that it has been undertaken without even a feasibility study. This lacuna, which might conceivably be a key part of Mr Nilekani's objective of driving the project ahead at all speed, is being dealt with by using each of its initial phases as opportunities for streamlining. However, problems being thrown up are being wilfully ignored, defeating the purpose of streamlining, especially as they indicate the presence of deep structural and conceptual flaws in Mr Nilekani's vision (which was expressed in a book he published at the end of 2008, Imagining India, believed to be the reason the Indian Prime Minister invited him to head the project). She has also personally witnessed enrollment processes of migrant workers in Delhi, and observed appalling compromises, with lack of oversight and training resulting in callous disregard of the existing identity information gathered by migrant workers for themselves.
Ramkumar described his interactions with Mr Nilekani at the project 'definition' stage, at a retreat attended by senior government officials. He is convinced that Mr Nilekani is now completely impervious to suggestions that this project is flawed, including serious problems with his grasp of the root problems of delivery of public services. This may not even be the purpose of the project, which Ramkumar's research has revealed (and which he has published several times in the mainstream media) is rooted in the Kargil war, a border skirmish with Pakistan in 1999, following which the then government (now in the opposition) proposed to issue the Multipurpose National Identity Card to border residents, evidently to prevent infiltration by undercover militants.
A secondary purpose was to stem illegal immigration, most significantly from Bangladesh, which shares a very large land border with India. The issues of foreign militants and immigrants are a popular topic to drum up political support, most typically by right-wing political ideologists, and hardly ever countered by political thinkers representing other viewpoints. The trouble with MNIC or any other such card concepts is that the Census Act specifically protects the privacy of censused people, thus this database is inaccessible for the purpose of issuing citizen identity cards. To get around this, the Citizenship Act of 1955 was amended in 2004 to enable the creation of the National Population Register, a database of Indian citizens. The exercise is to kick off this year, 2011, by using census data collection staffers to 'double up' as NPR data gatherers, thus bypassing the privacy provisions of the Census Act.
The present talk of social service delivery is arguably a smokescreen to cover the underlying 'national security' need. In fact, it is very convenient to ease the covert exit of direct government participation in services delivery, substituting this with an outsourcing model with which Mr Nilekani is well familiar, having helped build Infosys' commercial business on just this basis. This also explains the significant lack of public discussion, as this is a very radical policy change, likely to be highly contentious. The 'right-wing' political parties that formerly led the government, under whose administration this card project was initiated, is clearly hardly interested in opening up this debate into a public interlocution. The lack of even an Ordinance to temporarily legitimise UIDAI is clear when one understands that such an ordinance would have to be ratified in the following session of Parliament, which would entail public debate.
I basically spoke about the technology issues relating to the implementation of this project, ending with a summary of its project management flaws. Primarily: biometric information, both fingerprints and iris scanned, is completely unknown and largely unresearched as a tool for use in unique identification. While iris scanning is pretty new, about a decade or so, fingerprints have been used to identify repeat offenders by police forces around the world. Unfortunately, the future of this is now in severe doubt, as court cases in the US have revealed that the procedures are fundamentally flawed. iris scanning is akin to airport bodyscanning, in that the processes are being put in place in various places around the world, without any scientific basis or reason to believe that they are valid or foolproof, while being fundamentally an extreme invasion of personal space (in the case of bodyscanning, also invasive in terms of potentially hazardous radiation exposure). About project management, the lack of a preliminary feasibility study, resulting in a project taking off without a tightly designed process, serious flaws in the process design, including a flagrant lack of process audit during enrollment, the current phase, and the lack of infrastructure to take advantage of 'voluntarily' proffered PII (personal identification information) to assure tailored delivery of public services. As all these things are supposedly 'in the pipeline', the overall design of this project seems to be in the risky Ready, Shoot, Aim style, with 'problems' being 'taken care of' in due course (the 'quotes' are actual words and phrases used by Mr Nilekani in several interviews).
At the end, Prof Kathpalia summed up by reiterating the project management flaws and criticising the approach adopted for pursuing this project, which was a fairly notable reversal of his original thesis.
I have gone into some detail here, as the next two meetings, with different audiences in Mumbai on Saturday, covered much of the same ground, excepting that I was not myself a featured speaker or panelist. Instead, our listmember, JT D'Souza, a biometrics expert, whose core business is biometrics-based access control systems for secure locations, demonstrated how simple it is to spoof fingerprints, using extremely cheap commonplace materials and a little ingenuity. He pointed out that such access control systems work very well where they are backed up by supplementary surveillance systems - CCTV, armed guards etc, none of which are conceivably possible for millions of fair price shops and rural worksites where public subsidy programmes interface with citizens. Hopefully, videos of this demonstration will soon be available online, but this depends on Kamayani being able to complete uploading the large files soon. This is quite important, as it seems The Hindu journalist missed the point of the demonstration entirely - at least the other reporters, from DNA and HT, got it right. JTD demonstrated that is it quite trivial, and ridiculously inexpensive, to spoof a fingerprint scanning system - and not a fingerprint scanner that accepts false fingerprints. In fact, his demo device is a scanner that is very similar to the scanners ordered by UIDAI, and which he supplies regularly to clients needing access control systems for their workplaces.
The first meeting was held in St Xavier's, the well-known South Mumbai college. It was primarily for students, and the meeting hall was packed with students from the Economics, Sociology and Mass Media faculties. I do hope they follow up by publishing blogposts right away - they have a formal newsletter, but it has a monthly schedule. The post-presentation interaction was also very lively. One student, Joseph, had actually done an economics field internship last year studying the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna process, intended to benefit rural and disempowered workers, but which has all the hallmarks of similar disregard for the basics.
I must mention here that the main college hall had an ongoing exhibition of student work, one of which was a poster displaying the Fundamental Rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India, which unaccountably omitted mentioning the rights to free speech, life and liberty (the latter having been held by the Supreme Court to include privacy), and which I pointed out to our student hosts.
The second meeting was for the press, held in the Press Club, Mumbai, a favoured location for non-PR (ie not commercially sponsored) events here. It has resulted already in two news reports in Hindustan Times & DNA from Mumbai city, and another from the Hindu in Chennai. All these links have been posted to this group separately.
An important addition at this last meeting was pointing out the dubious connection between this project and L-1 Identity Systems, a US based company awarded the job of de-duplication, despite
1. its spotty record with other government bodies such as the New York State DMV, which slammed it (as its former corporate identity, Viisage) for validating forged driving licenses,
and 2. its links with US intelligence and security agencies, exemplified by the large number of former senior employees hired regularly upon retirement, including George Tenet, the CIA chief who furnished falsified data for presentation in the United Nations for sanctions against Iraq, that resulted in the current situation in that country.
One hopes that some of the media takes note of this contractor's presence, one that ought to raise alerts at the highest levels.
The Mumbai meetings, especially the Press Club, are thanks to Kamayani, who has worked very hard to ensure that this awareness initiative, with its primary focus on students, gained a decent amount of press coverage.
There were a number of journalists from non-English language publications present, but so far I am not aware of stories carried in any other publications. As we all know, the extent of financial muscle behind UIDAI's publicity drive is an enormous disincentive to publishers to present a balanced picture.
--
Vickram
