UID is — and will — change a lot of things in people’s lives

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That’s 30-year-old Ranjana Sonawane from Tembhli village in rural northern Maharashtra, the first Indian to get a 12-digit unique identification (UID) number.

With country’s ruling political party leader Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh travelling to her tribal village on September 29 last year, Sonawane knew that it must all mean something big and good.

Enrolling Sonawane marked the beginning of an ambitious, grandiose plan that could help breathe some order into the organised chaos that is India, although much of it is still hope. Government of India wants to use UID — to be issued to at least half of all Indians or 600 million citizens by 2014 — to reduce leakage in its public spending.

Yes, that also means making sure that the Rs58,000 crore taxpayer money spent in 2010 on food subsidy benefits poor Indians and not greedy traders or that the Rs52,505 crore government spend in the first nine months of fiscal 2010 reaches intended labourers and not corrupt politicians.

Leading the mammoth initiative is a technocrat who switched over from private sector to public sector in one of the most celebrated corporate to government transitions. In July 2009, Nandan Nilekani left Infosys, the software services firm he helped found, to head the UID Authority of India, with a cabinet rank, answerable to Parliament.

Budgetary allocation for the entire project is Rs3,170 crore. As per expenditure details given on UID website, Rs268.41 crore has been spent till March 31, 2011, and the year to March 31, 2012, has planned expenditure of Rs1,470 crore.

Besides better public distribution of food or other wages, UID is a beacon of hope for millions of Indians unable to avail basic services such as mobile telephony or banking because they are unable to prove their identity.

“The (UID) numbers will, for the first time, provide an identity to those who need it the most,” is how Nilekani explained it in one of his recent interviews.

Initiated in August 2009, India has already issued such IDs to nearly 16 million Indians till July.

Going forward, the pace of enrollment will touch a million Indians daily by October. In September 2010, when Sonawane was issued the UID number, around 4,000 Indian were being enrolled daily but that has now increased to over 4 lakh enrollments per day.

The process involves capturing bio-metric data such as fingerprint, scanning the iris besides recording basic biographical details and address. The idea is to be able to verify the identity of a citizen by matching his UID number with his biometric data.
When entire population has been enrolled, the UID database would have around 1.2 billion 12-digit numbers, 1.2 billion photographs, 2.4 billion iris scans and 1.2 billion fingerprints.

Storing all that information and handling verification requests calls for vast amounts of storage and computing power.

Public food distribution stores, telecom companies and banks are all expected to tap into this database to verify the identity of those applying for their respective services — be it opening a new bank account, buying kerosene or getting a new phone connection.

“The biggest challenges is to make sure that the systems are robust and capable of handling the demands of the process, which calls for serious computing power,” said Sunil Chandiramani, director, Ernst & Young, which is advising the government in selecting the right technology and technology vendor for the entire initiative. “Adding a new member means checking each of his/her fingerprints against millions of existing fingerprints in the database to ensure that there is no duplication.”

Leading Indian and multinational technology firms are helping the government in the ambitious endeavour.