Govt Plans To Track a Child’s Health, Education Through Unique IDs

The tracking mechanism will assign each child a unique number but will not capture a child’s biometric data.

The Union government plans to give unique numbers to children born in India in order to track the holistic development of children in education, health and jobs, Hindustan Times reported on 21 February.

A senior official from the HRD ministry told HT that the “tracking mechanism” will assign each child a unique number but one will not be required to enter biometric data. As a result, Aadhaar’s privacy and security concerns are likely to be avoided, he added.

Explaining how the system will work, the ministry official told HT that the database will track the child from birth till the child gets employed. In addition, the official said that the unique number will be used throughout but once a child gets an Aadhaar number, the number will be linked with it.

Work is underway to study existing data structure in the ministries and the ways in which convergence of data can take place so that information can be sourced from a single database, the HT report added. The ambit of the project is likely to include several ministries, including human resources development (HRD), women and child development, health, social justice, minority affairs, tribal affairs, and skill development, the report stated.

A third official on condition of anonymity told HT that this system can be used to evaluate schemes, such as the number of children who drop out of school.

We don’t have to undertake any survey. Once we know a child is born, and if she is not in any school, it simply means she is out of school. The same logic can be applied if she goes for vocational training, and we can also get to know after vocational training whether that child has got employed or not. This will help us evaluate the schemes too.

Official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to HT 

(With inputs from Hindustan Times)

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