Even as the two top guns of the UPA government — Union home minister P. Chidambram and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia — claimed to have “no turf war” between them over NPR and UIDAI, the issue seems to be far from resolved. The Cabinet Committee on UID (CCUID) is scheduled to meet on Wednesday to resolve the contentious issue of biometric data collection.
Sources in the government revealed that two sets of draft notes — one from home ministry and other by the Planning Commission — will be placed before the CCUIDI with an annexure from finance ministry for discussion.
They said, “As the home ministry and the Planning Commission continue to cling on to their respective positions on the issue and finance ministry suggesting not to go in for dual expenditure on a similar exercise, PM Manmohan Singh’s intervention could be crucial at the meeting tomorrow.”
The finance ministry in its annexure has suggested that the two “instead of fully rejecting each other’s points of view, should rather find a common platform, so that duplication in expenditure could be avoided,” sources said.
A rough estimate by the finance ministry officials suggests that if the exercise were done separately, the government would be incurring about `40,000 crores on each.
The Planning Commis-sion in its draft note, the sources said, has not only asked for extending the IT Czar Nandan Nilekani-led Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) mandate to cover over 200 million Indian residents, but has also proposed to give statutory status to the Authority.
The plan panel is of the view that once the UIDAI gets the statutory status the home ministry’s objections would be nullified. Countering the plan panel’s move, the home ministry is also learnt to have sent a draft Cabinet note to get approval for its ambitious project to issue smart identity cards to all residents in the country as part of NPR.
Incidentally, the main issue of contention between home ministry and the planning Commission is that the former has refused to use the biometric data collected by the registrars of the UIDAI.