NEW DELHI: Four days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his first public statement surprisingly backing the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), former UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani met with the PM and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and persuaded the new regime to persist with Aadhaar numbers and the Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme.
This meeting — a life-saver for the Aadhaar programme — happened on the first of July. On July 5, Modi sought a 100 crore enrolment target under Aadhaar at the ‘earliest’, casting aside earlier notions that the new government will go slow on the UIDAI project.
Nilekani, who was appointed by Congress to head UIDAI in 2009, was in Delhi in the last days of June to vacate the government bungalow allotted to him in Lutyens’ Delhi. It is during this period that he — and UIDAI — sought and obtained a meeting with the prime minister and the finance minister. Nine days after this meeting, Jaitley, in the Union Budget, increased allocation for UIDAI from Rs 1,550 crore (revised estimate) to Rs 2,039 crore.
Only two days before this, on July 3, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Telecom, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Planning Minister Rao Inderjeet Singh had met with top officials to discuss UIDAI versus the National Population Register (NPR), an entity under the home ministry that conducts the decadal census. The conclusions did not favour UIDAI in the form it was running till then.
Instead, it was decided that a panel of secretaries will work to ensure greater synergy between NPR and Aadhaar to prevent duplication in efforts to capture biometrics and the costs thereof. Earlier, BJP had also made plenty of anti-Aadhaar noises during its election campaign.
Shortly after the party won, BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar told ET: “Our concerns with Aadhaar are two-fold: the lack of a legal backing and the security implications.”
