Bihar shows smart card way to cleaner rural job scheme
Jaya Menon
Posted online: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 0000 hrs
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CHENNAI, JUNE 11:
Devanti Devi, Dilip Shaw and Bisuandayal Manjhi of the
Gonpura panchayat in Bihar will soon be sporting smart
job cards that also double up as ATM/debit cards. They
are workers under the National Rural Employment
Guarantee programme (NREG) and are among 170 men and
women in two villages who would be the first to be
registered as NREG members through a foolproof
biometric verification device.

For three days from last Tuesday, after the initial
hostility and scepticism, villagers in Kurkuri and
Dhuparchak Mushahari in Phulwarisharif block of Patna
district, gathered at the Panchayat office to place
their fingers (all 10) on a Korean-made biometric
device. Each finger was registered twice for getting
the best value of minutiae counts (the whorls and
ridges on a finger).

Then the villagers were photographed and all their
personal data was registered on their NREG Card. With
the photograph and details scanned and attached to
their names, the state created a permanent database on
the workers.

After the registration process was completed, the
verification was done immediately by entering the NREG
ID number, and the beneficiary was asked to place any
finger on the biometric device, a small machine that
is easily portable to the worksite. The individual’s
photograph instantly popped up from the database on
the computer monitor.

“The technology has been proven through a transparent
system. Now we have to link it to our NREG process
which will give every member a job card or a smart
card and cover entire Bihar,” Anup Mukherji,
Commissioner of the Rural Development Department, told
The Indian Express.

All that a panchayat would need for implementing a
fool-proof registration and verification process is a
biometric device costing about Rs. 20,000, a laptop
computer of about Rs. 25,000, a webcam or a digital
camera and a personnel for operating the devices.

With Nitish Kumar keen on making the poverty
alleviation programme a success in his state, his
government had initially hit on the idea of
fingerprinting each of the NREG workers at the time of
registration and during payment of their wages. But
this was hardly effective since verification of the
fingerprints was a mind-boggling process and required
a forensic expert to certify each of them.

It was around this time that an article in The Indian
Express on January 28 this year on a biometric
tracking concept devised by Kris Dev, a Chennai-based
e-governance consultant, caught the attention of the
Bihar administration. Mukherji got in touch with Kris
Dev and asked him to prove to the state government
that the technology worked at the ground level. “If
your solution does all that the article describes, it
would be ideal for Bihar where people find ways to
beat all systems,” Mukherji told Kris Dev.

Dev went to Patna in February to make a presentation
to the Bihar State Electronics Corporation and later
at two villages. On June 7, Nitish Kumar watched the
demo in the two villages that Kris Dev presented and
gave a spot clearance for the concept to be
implemented throughout Bihar.

“It is surprising that Bihar should become the first
state in India to introduce biometric tracking for
NREG,” said Dev today.



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