Statistics will tell you strange tales, but I ran across one recently that pretty much dropped my jaw. It was in a story about India’s recent declaration that it’s going to create secure, biometric identity cards (complete with a computer chip containing fingerprints, iris scans, criminal records and credit histories) for every single one of its 1.2 billion citizens. The intention is for each Indian citizen to have a unique number and for all of this information to be linked in government computers, forming one of the largest databases ever created.
The goal is to begin issuing the new cards within 18 months.
But the statistic is this: Right now in India, only about 7% of the population–around 75 million people–are registered with the government for income tax purposes.
I have a feeling that there’s a great story behind this statistic, in part because there are an enormous number of people in the United States who would weep hot tears of joy if they weren’t registered with the government for income tax purposes.
I don’t know how the 93% of Indian citizens got left out or whether the government has been actively trying to cast its tax net wider. It’s a mystery.
Beyond that statistical conundrum, though, is the enormous challenge involved in this kind of nationwide ID project.
Aside from the obvious question of securing the database against misuse from both inside and outside the government, the logistics of getting the data gathered, transferring it to a technically sophisticated piece of plastic and distributing the completed IDs to 1.2 billion people are daunting. The experience of many citizens of both India and the U.S. with government agencies isn’t reassuring. (Anyone remember what dealing with the old Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles used to be like?) And the idea of a brand new government agency doing something that’s never been done on this kind of scale doesn’t fill me with hope.
But India is a place of almost infinite resourcefulness, and I’m sure that the job will get done if the political consensus supporting it remains firm.
So, what’s the payoff? Well, the bottom line is that the more its people become part of the national community and the national economy, the more economic power India will develop. India’s GDP growth rate was 9.2% in 2007, fell to 7.4% in 2008, and was forecast to slip to 3.4% in 2009.
But the bottom appears to be in for the global economy. And if India’s initiative increases the country’s ability to serve its people, the results could be dramatic. The persistent knocks on India have been its underdeveloped infrastructure, smothering bureaucracy and its enormous number of citizens living in poverty and without access to education and jobs.
It would be naïve to expect ID cards to strike a blow against the first two of these enormous impediments. But a government that knows its citizens’ names can take steps to address the third. This looks like a good thing to me.