Nandan Nilekani visits Gujarat with UID project on agenda

“We will issue nation’s first Unique Identification number in next 12 to 18 months. Total 600 million people will be covered under the UID project in next four years then after”, said Nandan Nilekani in Ahmedabad today.

Nilekani, delivering annual Lincoln Memorial Lecture on ‘UID Project-Issues & Challenges’ organized by Indo-American Chamber of Commerce at Ahmedabad’s Tagore hall said his task is to create world’s largest biometric data, 10 time larger than existing largest data. To collect picture and finger print of 1.2 billion people is a huge task that will go on for years.

Nilekani said UID number will be useful to ensure a person’s identity. UID number will prove that a person who claims he is Mr. X is actually Mr. X or not. UID will not guarantee nationality, citizenship, entitlements, rights or benefits to a number holder. All residents of India including infants and children will get UID. In case of infant and child, a UID will be issued with parents or guardian’s data. UID number will be permanent and will be same for life-time.

He said, every resident of this country will get UID. When asked to specify what he meant by the word – Resident, Nilekani said resident requirement is under process of finalization. Once decided it will be put online on UID project’s website for public discussion. “The whole project is about inclusion of marginal class who don’t have any identity and therefore they are unable to get benefits of various schemes. Now if we think about inclusion then we can’t go for strict and in-depth verification. A debate on inclusion and verification will go on,” Nilekani said.

Narrating current status of UID project Nilekani said, “We are working on partnership model. We can have 100 to 200 partners who will work for us as registrars. There are 70,000 branches of banks, 1.4 million agents of LIC that we can leverage, various states can be our partner, oil companies, passport authority, various government schemes, Income Tax department etc also can work in partnership. Registrar partners will be provided finger print reader devices to register the people. Every day from our partners, we will get data on our central software and we will issue UID after checking the entries.Issuing authority was central and one, registering authorities would be several, having their presence at about 1 million points. In the course of deciding partners, I have met officials and leaders of 15 state governments. We will need volunteers also to implement the project. We will start volunteer programme after 1.5 years.”

Nilekani said, “everybody would have reason to want UID because at some time Passport authority, banks, mobile phone companies, gas dealer, pan card authority all will come out with cut off date before which one would have to have his/her UID number. These same agencies will also facilitate registration process for getting UID number. For marginal people, we would utilize schemes such as Janani suraksha, NREG and also NGO among others.”

“We have formed a biometric committee under Chairmanship of former Vigilance Commissioner Shree N.Vitthal. This committee will soon standardize biometric verification process for UID,” added Nilekani.

According to Nilekani, a simple UID card will have randomly generated number, name, date of birth, sex, address, parent’s name and picture. It will not have parameters such as income, religion, cast etc. Nilekani said the most difficult part of UID project will come after one year of its beginning when there will be a data of four hundred million names and daily about one million names will come for fresh entry. “Comparing existing 400 million peoples data with fresh 1 million peoples data daily will be a very difficult task.”

When asked “Mr. Nilekani, what would you do to accomplish the project within budget in time?”, Nilekani said: “prayer”. When a person asked whether one would get opportunity to choose his UID number? Nilekani said:”No the numbers would be generated randomly.” When a lady asked Nilekani whether UID number project is profitable or not, Nilekani replied:”this question was expected in Gujarat.”

One serious thing that the audience noticed was that when a girl asked Nilekani about whether Bangladeshi intruders living in India illegally would also get UID number because they are residents of India, Nilekani was non-committal about exclusion of such elements from UID number project. He said that UID would be issued to each resident of India and UID would not support any claim of citizenship or nationality. When asked what about the terrorists who would not come for UID registration, Nilekani said UID would be useful for security purpose also as hotels would be able to imply new rule to disallow a person inside their premises without UID. number.

Nilekani meets Modi

Nilekani met Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi to seek his support for UID number project. Nilekani also met government officials and discussed UID project in detail.