Dear Terrence, On 9/12/06, jtd <jtd at mtnl.net.in> wrote:
> Who are the issuers?
We will call the issuing authority Citizen Information Authority - CIA. :-)
> where is the database residing?
The database will be distributed across country and data will migrate vertically and horizontally.
> Who decides what is accessible and what isnt?
All public info is accessible. What is public and what is private is what we are debating on.
> What has caste, religion got to do with identity?
Nothing... I am against recording such info. But the Census department and other departments may gather this type of info for other purposes like reservations, demographic and social analysis.
> Who has access to the audit trail?
Anybody authorised by CIA.
Earlier attempts by all and sundry implementing id 1) Ration card - issuers were so corrupt, malicious, and incompetent that u could do whatever u please with the system - but ONLY thru a tout
Your observations are largely correct. Not universal and have already lost the credibility.
2) Passport - an upmarket version of the above
Very few have this document and it's costly and time consuming to acquire.
3) Voter id card - the contractors were an ecelectic mix of the above
Well... Again there were and are problem with this ID is well and not universal. Only available to individuals above the age of 18 years.
4) PAN GIR number
The number of people having this ID is a small percent of the population.
5) Domicile certificates
Never heard about this one...
6) Caste certificates
Isn't it part of Birth/Education record? Or it's separate document all to gather?
The above issues are essentially administrative, but the proposed system must mandatorily have built in checks and audit trails which are publicly viewable - not by filing forms under thr RTI, but by just visiting a website. Without which it would be yet another drain on everybody's time and money. Fortunately none of the above are mandatory, which the present scheme proposes to do away with. The best part is no two government agencies accept the above as sufficient proof of id, creating their own little id cess pools.
The idea behind CIS is to have universal and unique ID used and accepted by all Government and other Agencies. During the transition period, CIS will co-exist with other IDs and within finite time frame all other non-essential IDs will be eliminated.
Imo 1) publicly viewable audit trails 2) universal acceptance by ALL government and private agencies as the final and only essential proof of id 3) Ability to generate id at birth ie from primary health center
This is the 1st phase and 1st step of issuing the CIS. We have very healthy birth rate so all new citizens can start with this ID and along with him/her there relations starts getting the CIS IDs as well. I see a time line of about 5 years to complete this. It would not be impossible to issue 200 million IDs per year. This can be possible if we de-link issue of ID and verification/validation of the same. You can verify/validate ID at later stage may be at 1st use?
This will require the id to be DNA - other charcteristics are temporary and so riddled with holes it is pointless discussing - of primary member and parent (s). However big problem when one or both parents happen to be unknown / donors and when gene therapy might substantially modify the original dna.
To start with we can have simple data to be collected. More elaborate stuff can wait for later date.
More later.
Great... Keep the ideas flying.
Rgds JTD
With regards, -- --Dinesh Shah :-) -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
