600 mn to get UID by 2014, says Nilekani

BANGALORE: Over 600 million people, about half of the country's 1.2 billion population, will get their unique identification (UID) numbers by the end of 2014.

The rollout of the 16-digit UID number will commence in 12 to 18 months. The second half of the work is likely to take more time to complete as coverage will be slow in remote areas where people don't even have a basic identity.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will soon appoint a consultant to help identify an external agency to manage a data centre for the project.

Speaking at BangaloreIT.biz 2009's Vision 2020 Leadership series here on Friday, UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani said the committees constituted for biometrics, data standards and verification will submit their reports in a couple of months.

Nilekani said a large eco-system will be created to plan, execute and support the UID project in the next few months. Enrolment agencies and registrars will be appointed to monitor the work of 1000s of enrolment points.

Data collection and enrolment can also happen when citizens walk into utility service outlets, banks, tax offices or any citizen service kiosks for other services. However, no smart card is proposed to be issued to people with the numbers.

The eco-system will comprise central/state government agencies, banks, insurance companies, utility companies, telecom firms, banks and tax departments. Some of these agencies also may make the UID number mandatory for their customers.



Nilekani said the idea is to make the system work under a ubiquitous, low bandwidth, mobile-phone kind of environment. It will be supported by a massive security layer and fraud management. Technologies like cloud computing, virtualization andmassive memory management also could be used to run the system.