Yesterday I spent around an hour and a half just to complete the enrollment formalities - iris scan, finger print scans, photograph etc. - in order to initiate the process of obtaining an Aadhaar card for myself. There is a makeshift Aadhaar centre set up in the club of my apartment for the residents' convenience. Given that I had no distance to travel, no incomplete forms, no missing documents and, most importantly, only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, just what explains the hour and a half spent for something that ideally should take not more than 5-7 minutes?
The delay was caused because of a series of events. There was an elderly lady in the queue when I reached the counter. She was being made to place her fingertips to record her fingerprints. The machine records the percentage of clarity, and a minimum something is essential for the record to be valid. After several attempts, the lady had to finally give up and her application was processed with just 5 or 6 fingers' prints. There was some similar problem during her iris scan. The scanners were so talked about before the Aadhaar movement had begun. Unfortunately, they are not sophisticated enough and thus not sensitive enough to scan the prints of those whose bodies have borne the wear and tear of time. The gentleman just ahead of me was mocking all this, saying the lady's old age had wiped off her finger prints and made her iris un-scan-able. It was annoying after a while but it was no point asking him to stop and think if this happened to his own mother, because the lady was, in fact, his mother.
The Aadhaar process is infested with numerous loop holes which can be easily amended and eventually make the process flawless and much less time consuming. To begin with, the software that has been designed to record data is not compatible with Indian names and titles. One can type one's name correctly in English, but be prepared to find it distorted or misspelled in Hindi. My surname will appear in a way that I myself will not be able to pronounce. I can, in fact, type in Devanagari script without any difficulty here on my blog. Why was it such a huge task to design a proper software, I fail to fathom. Besides, my surname is not something which is unheard of that it becomes so difficult to type correctly. I'm not so miffed just because it was my surname in question. A lady named Amrita spent 15 minutes trying to get her name spelled correctly in Hindi. This is neither an understandable nor excusable error in India. The enrollment form that we fill out initially is not required at all. We might as well feed in all pertinent data online and then verify it at the time of processing alongwith our identity proof. It is a sheer waste of paper. The receipt that we get is printed on normal A4 sheets and then torn in half manually; one is retained by the enrollment in-charge and the other given to you. Why couldn't they be provided with perforated sheets? The enrollment in-charge struggles with a foot ruler to tear of the receipts in two halves. The finger print and iris scanner are not too sensitive, as illustrated by the elderly lady's case. The photograph is taken just for the heck of it. You may not look like yourself at all. The icing on the cake is the fact that will take anything from 3-10 months or probably more for the card to arrive.
I am not too sure what purpose the card will solve. I felt a surge of insecurity creeping in as my bio metrics were recorded. I wouldn't know if someone misused them. I have not got my bank account synchronised with it. From a much hyped programme with a humungous fund earmarked for it, that had the likes of Nandan Nilekani and Wipro Technologies associated with it, I expected something better.
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