J&K mulls unique ID for each family, parties wary

Our Correspondent

Jammu, December 11

To identify eligible beneficiaries of various social welfare schemes, the Jammu and Kashmir administration is planning to create a database of all families residing in the UT with each of them having a unique alpha-numeric code.

Alpha-numeric code

• All families in the Union Territory to have a unique alpha-numeric code
• Aim is to identify eligible beneficiaries of various social welfare schemes
• BJP welcomes the move, says a similar database exists in Haryana
• Other parties have raised concerns over personal data safety

While the BJP has welcomed the move to allot “family IDs”, other parties have raised concerns over personal data safety.

Prerna Puri, Commissioner Secretary of the IT Department, said the objective of the database, which would be on a par with Haryana’s Parivaar Pehchaan Patra, was that families or individuals would not have to apply to receive benefits under each individual scheme.

The BJP said the database would be helpful in many ways as people had been alleging that Census 2011 was not correct and many people had been wrongly added to the BPL category. A similar family database was already there in Haryana and so there was nothing to worry about, it said. Congress chief spokesperson Ravinder Sharma questioned the government’s intention and its capacity to protect such databases from cyberattacks.

National Conference provincial president Rattan Lal Gupta termed the exercise “unproductive use of resources”. PDP leader Virendra Singh Sonu said, “There are a lot of problems in J&K which the government ignores. Now, whom is the government trying to identify through this database?”

The plan was first unveiled during a conference on e-governance held in Katra recently. A Digital J&K Vision Document was released by Lt Governor Manoj Sinha which talked about creating an authentic and reliable data of all families living in J&K. The data base created for each family would identify them along with their socio-economic conditions, it said.

The database would identify each and every family in J&K and would collect the basic data of the family, provided with the consent of the family, in a digital format.

The details available in the database would be used to determine eligibility through automatic selection of beneficiaries for receiving social benefits. All applicable laws and regulations in respect of data protection shall be complied with in the management of data, it read.

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