BY KAREN LEIGH – APRIL 28, 2010
A source tells me they dislike the word ‘marketing’ over at AADHAAR HQ — and with good reason.
As we said in today’s paper, the challenge for Nandan Nilekani’s branding team — a mix of advisers from the private sector and UIDAI officials — is more than a simple advertising campaign. They have to make more than one billion people aware of the unique identity porject, then convince them to register.
Considering India’s population, it’s a heady task — countless languages, levels of literacy, dubious access to internet, television, newspapers and even power, alongside privacy and security concerns and the idea that one’s identity begins at birth and cannot be defined by the government.
In addition, the product being ’sold’ is a 12-digit electronic number. Not even a card to go with it. With that alone, this project becomes infinitely harder than trying to sell a pair of jeans or can of Coke.
The AADHAAR branders are planning a years-long push centered around both awareness (traditional advertising methods like posters and TV spots) and education (sending envoys into rural areas to help people understand the ID and convincing them to enroll in the AADHAAR program.)
Some outtakes from the key players in today’s story:
Nandan Nilekani, chair, UIDAI:
On the new logo and name: “We selected AADHAAR, meaning foundation off support, because we see the UID number as an investment for people, that different people will utilize in different ways. For a child it may be a foundation to go to school and for a young urban migrant a foundation to get a bank account to send money home. And for a rural woman it may be a foundation to get her food rations better.”
Kiran Khalap, UIDAI branding advisor and managing director of Chlorophyll:
“We’ve achieved two or three big things ach so far: brand construction — what are the aspects of this brand, the benefits, and the overall idea of the brand. We used this even in creating the brand name and logo.” It’s presented “any way a professional [communications firm] client would be briefed.”
In breaking down the population into target groups: “Our job is to make sure there is some kind of super structure, or a matrix, to how these communication objectives will be met. This will become the basis of the communication program. So who are the large segments to whom we want to speak?”
Shankar Maruwada, head, demand generation, communication and awareness, UIDAI:
“The idea is to connect with everyone who has wide expertise on this, government and corporate, and with those who serve bottom of the pyramid consumers. We’ll ask as many of them as possible to carry our message.”
The closest analogy to what they’re doing, within India? He says it’s the family planning campaign.
Showing posts with label Karen Leigh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karen Leigh. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
74 - A grass-roots challenge to the UID project by Karen Leigh - Live Mint
A grass-roots challenge to the UID project
Awareness is the first challenge the ambitious programme has encountered at the grass-roots level and while it will encounter more challenges, this is something the UIDAI, which oversees Aadhaar, needs to address quickly as it increases the scale and scope of its effort
Karen Leigh
Kibbanahalli, Karnataka: One humid day in May, in a small building off the main road, Manjola, a farm worker, sat at a small wooden table, pressing her fingers, one at a time on an electronic pad that scanned and stored her prints.
She is among the first Indians to be enrolled in the unique identity programme (UID), or Aadhaar, which seeks to provide at least 600 million residents with a universal government identity by 2011.
The only problem is that Manjola knows nothing about the programme in which she is being registered.
Awareness is the first challenge the ambitious programme has encountered at the grass-roots level and while it will encounter more challenges, this is something the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which oversees Aadhaar, needs to address quickly as it increases the scale and scope of its effort.
Manjola hadn’t heard of Aadhaar or UIDAI.
“No one has told me anything about it. I don’t know who’s in charge of it,” she said, leaning forward in her chair as her retinas are scanned, the second and final step in the biometric data gathering process. “My children’s school teacher told me there was a programme to give my children an ID, so I came because I knew that would be good for them.”
Pilot project: A Kibbanahalli resident (top) gets her photo taken for enrolling in Aadhaar; a biometric device is used to scan fingerprints. Most villagers have limited knowledge about the programme’s benefits. Hemant Mishra/Mint
Aadhaar met its initial target in this part of Karnataka; at least 2,200 residents of Kibbanahalli—and 25,000 in the Tumkur district—registered for the 12-digit Aadhaar numbers in a “proof of concept” study, a test ahead of the programme’s national roll-out, from August through next February.
Similar tests were carried out in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
The month-long Tumkur project, which concluded on Thursday, showed two or three clerical mistakes per 100 registrants.
“There will be mistakes because it’s early on,” said Raju S.K., a teacher who participated in both rounds of the test. “My name was written wrong; a wrong initial.”
But the larger issue, if Tumkur is any indication, is awareness, especially among the rural poor whom UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani has said will be the programme’s biggest beneficiaries.
The UIDAI’s communication and awareness team plans a large-scale education push for the weeks leading up to the test’s start in August.
But with limited trained personnel on the ground, it could be an uphill battle.
Vijay Mahajan, chairman of Hyderabad-based Basix, which works to promote microfinance innovation in rural areas, said that in the absence of a structured education programme, word of mouth among rural residents would be crucial.
“The first few million people who get a UID will end up educating their neighbours, and slowly it will spread,” he said. “They won’t know it conceptually, or just because they enrolled. They’ll know about it after they’ve had some experience using it.”
In Kibbanahalli, the only visible sign of Aadhaar’s presence was one UIDAI sign, set far back from the road at the door to an enrolment site.
At another centre where data was being collected, there was no signage and no lighting. Several residents waiting in line to have their biometrics recorded said they didn’t know what a unique identity was and had never heard of Nilekani or the project.
During the early stages, turnout was so thin in Kibbanahalli that local officials began doing everything in their power to draw in registrants.
Adarsha S.S., a programme supervisor in Tumkur, said this included the practice of telling residents to bring their government-issued ration cards to one of the Aadhaar enrolment sites, without first telling them that once there, their fingerprints and retinas would be scanned for a UID.
“People came on a small scale before, during the first round,” he said. “Then we told them to bring their ration cards, and they began coming more.”
Nanja Muri, the village accountant in Kibbanahalli, highlighted the dearth of manpower in rural areas.
He said that only district revenue inspectors—in Tumkur, he added, there is only one overseeing 48 villages—had been sufficiently trained by government officials to educate residents, and that village accountants in the district had taken it upon themselves to spread the word among residents.
Muri’s own grass-roots effort included a small musical band that walked the streets, drawing people out of their homes to explain the fundamentals of UID and provide them with application forms.
Kathye Yini, a local housewife who had just been registered for a unique identity, said she had learned of the programme through Muri, who knocked on her door one night.
She added that it was her neighbours—and not government officials—who were responsible for her limited knowledge of the programme’s benefits.
When asked about the impact a UID would have on her life, she only knew that, unlike the ration and voter ID cards she currently possessed, a UID would give her proof of address if she travelled outside Karnataka.
UIDAI officials are not surprised about the initial responses.
“It’s a slim organization compared to the width and breadth of India,” said K.K. Sharma, assistant director general of UIDAI’s regional office in Bangalore. “We were expecting teething mistakes.”
He said that by August, fewer than 30 UIDAI staffers would be working in the regional headquarters in Bangalore, overseeing three states, two Union territories and at least 150 million residents.
Sharma declined comment on the issue of lack of publicity.
However, an official, who did not want to be named, said that the proof of concept was only meant to be a technical test of the biometric machines and overall enrolment process, and not meant to be about explaining the programme to people. In the next month, UIDAI’s awareness council will be submitting its report on the communication strategies it should employ to increase awareness among rural residents.
Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, who has opposed the programme as well as the government’s decision to have Nilekani head it, said it was troubling that residents did not comprehend why they were providing their personal information.
Basix’s Mahajan said that given the advantages the programme would eventually bestow on them, people would learn, though it would be of their own accord.
“When the first woman to be registered for a UID in a village sticks her finger on a biometric device and is able to access banking with it, she’ll get excited and will tell her friends,” he said. “And thus UID will spread.”
karen.l@livemint.com
Awareness is the first challenge the ambitious programme has encountered at the grass-roots level and while it will encounter more challenges, this is something the UIDAI, which oversees Aadhaar, needs to address quickly as it increases the scale and scope of its effort
Karen Leigh
Kibbanahalli, Karnataka: One humid day in May, in a small building off the main road, Manjola, a farm worker, sat at a small wooden table, pressing her fingers, one at a time on an electronic pad that scanned and stored her prints.
She is among the first Indians to be enrolled in the unique identity programme (UID), or Aadhaar, which seeks to provide at least 600 million residents with a universal government identity by 2011.
The only problem is that Manjola knows nothing about the programme in which she is being registered.
Awareness is the first challenge the ambitious programme has encountered at the grass-roots level and while it will encounter more challenges, this is something the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which oversees Aadhaar, needs to address quickly as it increases the scale and scope of its effort.
Manjola hadn’t heard of Aadhaar or UIDAI.
“No one has told me anything about it. I don’t know who’s in charge of it,” she said, leaning forward in her chair as her retinas are scanned, the second and final step in the biometric data gathering process. “My children’s school teacher told me there was a programme to give my children an ID, so I came because I knew that would be good for them.”
Pilot project: A Kibbanahalli resident (top) gets her photo taken for enrolling in Aadhaar; a biometric device is used to scan fingerprints. Most villagers have limited knowledge about the programme’s benefits. Hemant Mishra/Mint
Aadhaar met its initial target in this part of Karnataka; at least 2,200 residents of Kibbanahalli—and 25,000 in the Tumkur district—registered for the 12-digit Aadhaar numbers in a “proof of concept” study, a test ahead of the programme’s national roll-out, from August through next February.
Similar tests were carried out in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
The month-long Tumkur project, which concluded on Thursday, showed two or three clerical mistakes per 100 registrants.
“There will be mistakes because it’s early on,” said Raju S.K., a teacher who participated in both rounds of the test. “My name was written wrong; a wrong initial.”
But the larger issue, if Tumkur is any indication, is awareness, especially among the rural poor whom UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani has said will be the programme’s biggest beneficiaries.
The UIDAI’s communication and awareness team plans a large-scale education push for the weeks leading up to the test’s start in August.
But with limited trained personnel on the ground, it could be an uphill battle.
Vijay Mahajan, chairman of Hyderabad-based Basix, which works to promote microfinance innovation in rural areas, said that in the absence of a structured education programme, word of mouth among rural residents would be crucial.
“The first few million people who get a UID will end up educating their neighbours, and slowly it will spread,” he said. “They won’t know it conceptually, or just because they enrolled. They’ll know about it after they’ve had some experience using it.”
In Kibbanahalli, the only visible sign of Aadhaar’s presence was one UIDAI sign, set far back from the road at the door to an enrolment site.
At another centre where data was being collected, there was no signage and no lighting. Several residents waiting in line to have their biometrics recorded said they didn’t know what a unique identity was and had never heard of Nilekani or the project.
During the early stages, turnout was so thin in Kibbanahalli that local officials began doing everything in their power to draw in registrants.
Adarsha S.S., a programme supervisor in Tumkur, said this included the practice of telling residents to bring their government-issued ration cards to one of the Aadhaar enrolment sites, without first telling them that once there, their fingerprints and retinas would be scanned for a UID.
“People came on a small scale before, during the first round,” he said. “Then we told them to bring their ration cards, and they began coming more.”
Nanja Muri, the village accountant in Kibbanahalli, highlighted the dearth of manpower in rural areas.
He said that only district revenue inspectors—in Tumkur, he added, there is only one overseeing 48 villages—had been sufficiently trained by government officials to educate residents, and that village accountants in the district had taken it upon themselves to spread the word among residents.
Muri’s own grass-roots effort included a small musical band that walked the streets, drawing people out of their homes to explain the fundamentals of UID and provide them with application forms.
Kathye Yini, a local housewife who had just been registered for a unique identity, said she had learned of the programme through Muri, who knocked on her door one night.
She added that it was her neighbours—and not government officials—who were responsible for her limited knowledge of the programme’s benefits.
When asked about the impact a UID would have on her life, she only knew that, unlike the ration and voter ID cards she currently possessed, a UID would give her proof of address if she travelled outside Karnataka.
UIDAI officials are not surprised about the initial responses.
“It’s a slim organization compared to the width and breadth of India,” said K.K. Sharma, assistant director general of UIDAI’s regional office in Bangalore. “We were expecting teething mistakes.”
He said that by August, fewer than 30 UIDAI staffers would be working in the regional headquarters in Bangalore, overseeing three states, two Union territories and at least 150 million residents.
Sharma declined comment on the issue of lack of publicity.
However, an official, who did not want to be named, said that the proof of concept was only meant to be a technical test of the biometric machines and overall enrolment process, and not meant to be about explaining the programme to people. In the next month, UIDAI’s awareness council will be submitting its report on the communication strategies it should employ to increase awareness among rural residents.
Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, who has opposed the programme as well as the government’s decision to have Nilekani head it, said it was troubling that residents did not comprehend why they were providing their personal information.
Basix’s Mahajan said that given the advantages the programme would eventually bestow on them, people would learn, though it would be of their own accord.
“When the first woman to be registered for a UID in a village sticks her finger on a biometric device and is able to access banking with it, she’ll get excited and will tell her friends,” he said. “And thus UID will spread.”
karen.l@livemint.com
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
37 - ID programme faces first challenge over privacy, data by Venkatesha Babu and Karen Leigh - Source - Live Mint
Monday, May 24, 2010
75 - ID programme faces first challenge over privacy, data
CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE - Posted by Ram Krishna Swamy
ID programme faces first challenge over privacy, data
Venkatesha Babu and Karen Leigh
The government is looking to the ID programme to help ensure that various welfare programmes reach the poor
Bangalore/New Delhi: In the first significant challenge to the government’s ambitious programme to give more than one billion Indians a unique identification number, a group of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are planning to take the government to court over a range of issues, including concerns over privacy and the safety of information.
About 100 NGOs, including Alternative Law Forum, Centre for Internet and Society, People’s Union for Civil Liberty and Slum Jagathu, have come together to oppose the implementation of the project in its current form, Mathew Thomas, general secretary of Citizens’ Action Forum, said in Bangalore on Wednesday.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) “is not a statutory body, not having been created by any Act or under any law, but by executive fiat”, he said. “It is set up as an appendage to the Planning Commission. It cannot be scrutinized either by Parliament or the Comptroller and Auditor General.”
In what had been expected to become a hurdle to the project, those against it are citing data protection and privacy, factors that led to the failure of a similar initiative in the UK.
“The government could not prevent recent cyber attacks by Chinese hackers on its own websites. What guarantee is there that a centralized database would be safe?” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Centre for Internet and Society, one of the groups opposed to the ID programme, which has been named Aadhaar. “Also, data collected might be misused to discriminate against minorities and other vulnerable sections of society.”
R.S. Sharma, UIDAI director general, declined to comment in detail.
“Everything is transparent. Whatever we have been doing, we have been putting it on our website,” he said. “As to their specific complaints, I will not be able to respond over the telephone.”
The NGOs are also questioning the cost of the project and why no feasibility study was conducted. UIDAI is headed by Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and former chief executive of Infosys Technologies Ltd, India’s second largest software firm.
“First, the government has to respond how the chairman was chosen and appointed,” Thomas said. “Would the same person in his earlier organization authorize a project involving thousands of crores without a preliminary project report on feasibility? Public money is being spent without accountability.”
Nilekani wasn’t reachable for comment.
The government is looking to the ID programme to help ensure that various welfare programmes reach the poor. This objective would be difficult to achieve, the NGOs said.
“In a country with 48% illiteracy, a 12-digit card might prove to be a handicap instead of help,” they said in a release. “The project in its present form must be scrapped.”
The NGOs also said that projected savings from the stemming of leakages owing to the ID programme were not authenticated or backed by independent data. “It’s surprising that the project is being implemented with no discussion in Parliament nor consultation with other political parties,” they said.
venkatesha.b@livemint.com
75 - ID programme faces first challenge over privacy, data
CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE - Posted by Ram Krishna Swamy
ID programme faces first challenge over privacy, data
Venkatesha Babu and Karen Leigh
The government is looking to the ID programme to help ensure that various welfare programmes reach the poor
Bangalore/New Delhi: In the first significant challenge to the government’s ambitious programme to give more than one billion Indians a unique identification number, a group of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are planning to take the government to court over a range of issues, including concerns over privacy and the safety of information.
About 100 NGOs, including Alternative Law Forum, Centre for Internet and Society, People’s Union for Civil Liberty and Slum Jagathu, have come together to oppose the implementation of the project in its current form, Mathew Thomas, general secretary of Citizens’ Action Forum, said in Bangalore on Wednesday.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) “is not a statutory body, not having been created by any Act or under any law, but by executive fiat”, he said. “It is set up as an appendage to the Planning Commission. It cannot be scrutinized either by Parliament or the Comptroller and Auditor General.”
In what had been expected to become a hurdle to the project, those against it are citing data protection and privacy, factors that led to the failure of a similar initiative in the UK.
“The government could not prevent recent cyber attacks by Chinese hackers on its own websites. What guarantee is there that a centralized database would be safe?” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Centre for Internet and Society, one of the groups opposed to the ID programme, which has been named Aadhaar. “Also, data collected might be misused to discriminate against minorities and other vulnerable sections of society.”
R.S. Sharma, UIDAI director general, declined to comment in detail.
“Everything is transparent. Whatever we have been doing, we have been putting it on our website,” he said. “As to their specific complaints, I will not be able to respond over the telephone.”
The NGOs are also questioning the cost of the project and why no feasibility study was conducted. UIDAI is headed by Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and former chief executive of Infosys Technologies Ltd, India’s second largest software firm.
“First, the government has to respond how the chairman was chosen and appointed,” Thomas said. “Would the same person in his earlier organization authorize a project involving thousands of crores without a preliminary project report on feasibility? Public money is being spent without accountability.”
Nilekani wasn’t reachable for comment.
The government is looking to the ID programme to help ensure that various welfare programmes reach the poor. This objective would be difficult to achieve, the NGOs said.
“In a country with 48% illiteracy, a 12-digit card might prove to be a handicap instead of help,” they said in a release. “The project in its present form must be scrapped.”
The NGOs also said that projected savings from the stemming of leakages owing to the ID programme were not authenticated or backed by independent data. “It’s surprising that the project is being implemented with no discussion in Parliament nor consultation with other political parties,” they said.
venkatesha.b@livemint.com
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