A population of one billion may be difficult to manage  but it offers a market that is unique in terms of opportunity and challenge—especially if the job at hand is to create a database and issue an ID card to each member therein.

Just consider the kind of wide area IP network that the election commission (EC) has in place to manage a database almost half the size of the present Indian population: 1,500 centers, a mix of leased lines, VSATs, dial-up RAS and modem arrays across 32 states and union territories terminating in a GIS system and a Web server in Delhi. However, the union ministry of home plans to achieve much more than the EC—not only capturing information about each of these one billion citizens, but also to create a mechanism that would enable regular updating of the data. The ministry also realizes that in order to achieve 100% results the country needs to complete the task in less than five years.

In technology terms, according to the TCS feasibility report on the citizen database project submitted to the ministry of home affairs, this translates into a massive five-tier network comprising 15,000 collection points, 462 access layers, five backbone layers and one central data warehouse. The TCS report also recommends use of optical character recognition techniques, as the proposed ID card in plastic will have 2-D bar coding and store biometrics of the cardholder. "In fact, the use of biometrics for a population of one billion itself warrants R&D effort as no company in the world has algorithm to match one in a billion biometrics, irrespective of whether it is a fingerprint or image of an iris," says Phiroz Vandrevala, executive vice-president, TCS. The TCS report has also christened the project as Nishan or National Identity System Home Affairs Network.

Technology apart, experts feel that the ambition to accurately capture complete citizenry data in less than five years is too big a task considering that globally a pre-implementation six-year phase is common, with exceptions such as Poland where it stretched to 10 years. On the contrary, the TCS report suggests that if India adopts a market-based data capture model, it will not only be able to speed up the process and complete it within the desired time frame, but also help reduce the overall project cost.

The Nishan mechanism

While the present census exercise could have been the best vehicle to simultaneously capture data for Nishan, the government somehow missed the bus. Nevertheless, TCS recommends that the country can still make up on the time lost by deciding to capture data though a flat structure based on private initiative and a market model, where the data would be owned and secured by the government. However, the plan suggests use of government machinery in sensitive areas, like the North-East and Jammu and Kashmir and also in non-sensitive yet remote or sparsely inhabited areas.

To make things easier, TCS applied the RK Swamy/BBDO analysis to the habitat-dispersion matrix derived from the 19991 census. This enabled it to classify population into urban, sub-urban and rural. According to the report, while 82.4% of the Indian population resides in non-sensitive urban and sub-urban locations, 13.1% people live in non-sensitive but remote rural villages. Also, of the 4.5% of the population in the sensitive areas, 1.8% live in urban and sub-urban habitats whereas the remaining 2.7% reside in remote rural locations. Says Viraj R Chopra, consultant TCS and the man heading the team responsible for preparing the Nishan feasibility report, "The exercise helped us filter out habitation that would require a special and possibly a mobile data capture mechanism, that in all likelihood will be beyond the ambit of the market model."

However, what this also means is that the market-based data capture model would be good enough to cover majority—more than 80%—of the Indian population. The report recommends a network of 15,000 franchisee to cover this population. The TCS report suggests 60 enrollments per day, per workstation in non-sensitive areas. In sensitive areas, however, TCS suggests an enrollment rate of 75 per day per workstation. This, according to the report, would be enabled by the comparatively more managed process in these areas. The speed of enrollment also needs to be increased keeping in mind the climatic constraints that exist in the sensitive areas.

Says Chopra, "The TCS plan is very much like that of the DoT’s decision to allow private operators to facilitate STD and ISD calls through public call office (PCO) booths. Prior to its liberalization decision, anybody willing to make STD or ISD calls had only two options—they could either book a trunk call, that took ages to materialize, or go to the nearest DoT center to speak with their dear ones. The process was not only cumbersome, it was also not customer friendly. However, consumer is rightly the king now as one can just walk into any of the many PCO booths or even call them for arranging a conference call. While the DoT’s business has gone up, consumers have convenience and several thousands have got a means to support their families."

Chopra and his team have also divided the information to be captured from an individual into three types—personal details, biometrics and verification references and documents. Based on these details, TCS has also drawn a list of applications, the database and application architecture, the network topology and the cost involved.

"A lot needs to be done before Nishan becomes a reality"

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