India Insight

There was a television ad some time back where a village leader played by Bollywood actor Abhishek Bachchan cutely decrees that feuding villagers would be known by their mobile numbers rather than names denoting caste or community.

It’s an idea that no longer seems far-fetched.

This week, the finance minister allocated 1200 million rupees to  the Unique Identification Authority of India, headed by former Infosys chief Nandan Nilekani.

The project provides a unique identity number, something like the U.S. social security number, to India’s billion-plus citizens.

It involves setting up a database with the identification details of citizens.

“It also uses an advanced technology like biometrics on a scale which has not been used anywhere in the world,” said Nilekani.

The biometric details will make identification foolproof.

Multi-purpose National Identity Cards have already been issued to a million citizens under a test scheme in some districts.

Having covered government policy for years, I have lost count of the number of foreign businessmen I have heard complaining about how difficult it was to set up in India. But a visit to a government passport office just outside the capital this week showed it can be just as frustrating getting out.

The government has been talking about easing rules for the issue of passports, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has time and again called for better governance.

Both were in short supply in Ghaziabad, a chaotic urban mess in Uttar Pradesh state, one of India’s least developed, where to get anything done, it seems, you have to call in a favour.