Citizen identification system (CIS): an initiative by the Karnataka knowledge commission

Abstract

A contemporary concern that arises while working with the Government is the information asymmetry at two levels between Government departments and between the Government and its citizens. The asymmetry in information is with respect to the transparency in functioning of the Government. There is lack of accountability on the part of the Government with respect to the delivery of services to its citizens and the optimal use of tax payers money. While analyzing the service delivery by Government, we notice that the resources are limited and the demand for service increases with rising population and expectations of the existing population. In order that the citizens are rendered high quality services we can work with the Government in two ways. Design and implement new streams of services for the population or optimize resource utilization in existing schemes. The former involves budgetary allocation and lobbying with concerned in the Government. We therefore decided to contribute to the latter part through the vehicle called the Karnataka Knowledge Commission. We therefore conducted primary research on three important departments in the Karnataka Government where there are existing schemes that are intended to serve the public. Through these studies we realized that one of the most common and important limitations of the existing schemes are that of identifying the beneficiaries who ought to receive these services by the Government. In India, we classify people who earn less than INR 300 a month as people belonging to the Below Poverty Line (BPL) and they are around 300 Million in number. What we see in our case studies is that the intention of the Government to serve the poorest of the poor is genuine but there is no real way to tag a person as one belonging to the BPL category or not; a situation where the needy are not served or the ones who not entitled to the services walk away with the goodies. The intention of the study is really to see that the needy are served and as a side effect prevent the illegal beneficiaries from receiving benefits. We look at the existing identity systems in the country and evaluate the same. Then, we move on to describe the Citizen Identification System. We describe its contents, the technologies it ought to use and the business model recommended for a large scale implementation of the same. We also evaluate the CIS with the same set of parameters that we used for the existing systems and realize that the CIS will be an improved version of an identity system. Finally, we present a case study of the American identity system called the Social Security Number (SSN) which is a model that we wish that CIS should emulate and better.