Monday, January 10, 2011

Time To Put Aadhar Project And UIDAI On Hold Has Come

India is not comfortable with planning, management and project appraisal before executing its projects. Some of these projects are of great public importance but they face sudden death due to poor planning and management. The worst part of the same is till the death of these half baked projects, lots of hard earned public money is already wasted. India is also not very active in taking clue from other nations.

Of late India has launched many projects like e-courts, Aadhar/UID project, national intelligence grid (NATGRID), e-governance projects under national e-governance plan (NEGP), etc. None of them have been successful except one or two projects that can be counted on fingers

It is always a good exercise to adopt a project analysis before hand. Projects like Natgrid have been stalled because they were not planned and executed properly. Fortunately, we have cabinet committee on security (CCS) of India that put on hold Natgrid. But unfortunately we do not have any authority regarding UID project of India that can put on hold Aadhar project till it complies with all the requirements, statutory as well as constitutional. The Aadhar project is managed by an authority called UIDAI that itself is not legally constituted.

Experience from countries like UK and US has shown that projects similar to Natgrid and Aadhar have been great failures and were ultimately scrapped off completely. These countries have learnt this hard way by spending crores of money before saying a final good by to these projects.

India on the other hand is adamant to carry on these projects even if they are illegal and unconstitutional. It seems that these projects have become an indirect method of booty sharing among big companies of India.

The UID project is estimated to incur Rs. 45,000 crore as expenses. The finance minister Pranab Mukherjee has already set aside Rs 1,900 crore for the project. UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani has admitted that the project has already spent Rs 200 crore.

This is unbelievable. India has already spent Rs. 200 crores upon a project that has no law to govern it. Even worst is that the finance ministry is willing to provide more money for a project that is bound to be a failure in its present form.

Time has come to put on hold the Aadhar project of India till all irregularities and illegalities of this project are first removed as per the mandates of statutory laws and constitution of India.