Bihar state in India to use biometric to curb political corruption

Jack Valenti, who died last month at age 85, was an aid to Lyndon Johnson in Texas and in the White House before becoming the presdient of the Motion Picture Association of America. Reflecting on his days in Texas politics, he once said that “After I die, I want to be buried in Texas because I want to remain politically active.” Indeed, if you are looking for a market in which there will always be opportunities to make money, solutions which offer to control corruption in politics is it. India is no exepction, and the state of Bihar is likely to become the first state in India to offer the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP) to people through a biometric test. Beginning today and lasting for two days, a Karnataka company will conduct workshops at a panchayat on a pilot basis to work out a cost-benefit analysis for deploying biometrics to plug the leakages in NREGP.

What the Bihar authorities are after is a low-cost machine which will be able to detect the fingerprint of an NREGP beneficiary and will maintain a log for the number of days he has worked and the payment he is entitled to. It will once again record that it is the registered worker who has collected the payment and not some fictitious person. “I know it is not my money — it is the money coming from the Centre. But that is not enough reason for us to let it fall through the crevices. There is no point lying about it — there is a lot of leakage in NREGP. How to check it has become an obsession with me. It seems to me that biometrics is one way to correct it. So we are conducting an experiment,” said Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

NREGP employment has suffered from corruption not unheard of when it comes to public employment: Non-existent muster rolls, no job cards, job cards but no work — these are only some of the problems with NREGP which is one of the most crucial programmes for Bihar.