From genetics to social perspective to spiritual understanding to occupational and educational choices, a lot depends on family when it comes to development of individuals and young minds generation after generation. This directly and collectively is responsible in defining the tone and tint of India as a country and its national Identity. For Indian democracy too, family stands probably as the most important social institution. In a way family is an inevitable parameter to plan not only for proper welfare delivery but to achieve new growth benchmarks too. For all of this though, a strong data log is a requisite for a planning of this stature. And the concept of a family ID is a topic of interest.
India has been exploring prospects of establishing a “universal family ID” ecosystem in the country – which is to be built on the same concept as Aadhaar card being the unique identification number for every Indian citizen. A miniature implementation of the same can be seen in the Haryana Government’s 2019 move wherein it came up with the ‘Parivar Pehchaan Patra’ (PPP) through which the state government enrolled around 54 lakh families living across the state. Under PPP, each family counts as a single unit and is allotted a unique 8-digit identity number, which becomes the family health id number for each member.
The move can be a game changer for government in especially combating the menace of corruption. This is because of the larger transparency that family ID can bring to the surface, by giving direct details of beneficiary families and cancelling all the goofed-up and old data presently registered in the existing systems. Further, because of the lack of authentication and verification processes, a common challenge the administration has been facing is ‘exclusion’ or ‘duplication’ of beneficiaries from welfare schemes. There have also been cases where beneficiaries belonging to same family have received benefits using different IDs. Presence of PPP protects from such cases to happen. The family identifier card, with a strong data inventory, can help in streamlining beneficiary identification and registration processes, ensure data symmetry and interoperability, in order to ensure smooth transfer of benefits to the public.
Family plays a key role in defining the health status of an individual whether it is through genetics or through shared social and physical environment. In terms of healthcare too, a family ID will mean a complete record of family level health details, a database that can lead to a better health infrastructure and aid facilities by the government. Family data will thus give a lot of inputs to the government, administration and scientific institutions so that they can plan utilisation, consumption and expenditure in an optimal manner and open gates to innovative solutions for a plethora of environmental, physical, educational, and even social ailments. This kind of documentation may even be of great assistance to struggling groups, especially families being run by single-mothers, old guardians, children who have lost both their parents, etc.
As powerful and useful as this idea may be, certain loopholes also need to be taken care of, especially in cases of deaths/births registration, missing documents within families, divorce cases, etc. However, this is a small bottleneck compared to the ease this data can extend. One can go back to the time when the government rolled out the concept of making Aadhar card for all. Though the idea was not loved by many and faced criticisms in the initial years, there is no denying the fact that the full scale implementation by India has led to a massive capacity-building across the country bringing out system excellence, administrative ease and a confidence of taking up projects of large scale implementation. The concept of creating and maintaining family ID records possesses a similar untapped potential.
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