Sunil R. Chandiramani, Partner & National Director-Advisory Services and Guru Malladi, Partner Ernst & Young spoke about the complexity involved in implementing UID and how technology could be a big enabler in this project
Sunir R Chandiramani
Chandiramani addressed the keynote session on why the unique ID project, Aadhaar, was important to all the CIOs present at the Senate. In his presentation Unique ID - The concept and its impact, he said, “The Aadhaar project aims to provide a 12-digit unique identity number, which will have the iris and biometric fingerprints of individual citizens who otherwise lack ID proof. A unique ID will be assigned to every citizen. This solution will prevent leakages and reduce the cost of transacting for both government as well as non-government agencies in extending the social welfare schemes to citizens.” He added that the unique ID should not be mistaken for just another card and that it would not have profile information and would not be mandatory but rather it would be voluntary. Since the project is heavily dependent on IT for a successful roll out, it provides a big opportunity for CIOs to make a difference to their organization and learn from it.
He agreed that there were substantial challenges that had to be overcome while implementing UID on account of the sheer size of the project—India's 1.2 billion population that is constantly growing, segmenting citizens (600 million to begin with) in 600,000 villages and the logistics required to reach out to every one of them, which is quite a challenge in itself.
“The opportunity is unlimited here for residents, government agencies and the corporate sector to analyze the data and customer profiles to conduct business intelligently. Multiple partners are being channelized to deliver services to residents,” he said.
Malladi talked about the challenges that were involved in implementing the Aadhaar project and how technology can help address these challenges. According to him, thanks to the immense size of the project, the government had engaged multiple partners (for enrollment and authentication of citizen records) who would, in turn, send biometric and iris data along with other details such as demographic data to registrars (States), who would, in turn, send the master data to the Central ID Data Repository (CIDR) where deduplication of records would be looked into. Once the exercise was over, banks would be in a position to use unique ID for customer verification by checking the data with CIDR records for opening new bank accounts for residents. Further, this project also needed to address sustainability, scalability, technological issues and provide privacy and security to individual resident's records added Malladi.
Some of the technological issues that this project would address are handling 1.2 billion records, compiling the largest biometric database to date, providing privacy and security to records, accurately capturing biometric data, providing 1:N biometric deduplication, handling one million enrollments per day, putting together a storage architecture that can help transfer 5+ TB/day of data to CIDR for thousands of enrollment stations and handling 100+ million authentications per day.
Malladi said, “We are contemplating a model wherein we can offer a single integrated boxed solution that addresses the business and technological challenges of this project. This integrated solution would include commodity hardware such as high-end servers (SMP 16 cores/node), storage technologies, deduplication and the like—integrated for a plug and play deployment.
He agreed that there were substantial challenges that had to be overcome while implementing UID on account of the sheer size of the project—India's 1.2 billion population that is constantly growing, segmenting citizens (600 million to begin with) in 600,000 villages and the logistics required to reach out to every one of them, which is quite a challenge in itself.
“The opportunity is unlimited here for residents, government agencies and the corporate sector to analyze the data and customer profiles to conduct business intelligently. Multiple partners are being channelized to deliver services to residents,” he said.
Malladi talked about the challenges that were involved in implementing the Aadhaar project and how technology can help address these challenges. According to him, thanks to the immense size of the project, the government had engaged multiple partners (for enrollment and authentication of citizen records) who would, in turn, send biometric and iris data along with other details such as demographic data to registrars (States), who would, in turn, send the master data to the Central ID Data Repository (CIDR) where deduplication of records would be looked into. Once the exercise was over, banks would be in a position to use unique ID for customer verification by checking the data with CIDR records for opening new bank accounts for residents. Further, this project also needed to address sustainability, scalability, technological issues and provide privacy and security to individual resident's records added Malladi.
Some of the technological issues that this project would address are handling 1.2 billion records, compiling the largest biometric database to date, providing privacy and security to records, accurately capturing biometric data, providing 1:N biometric deduplication, handling one million enrollments per day, putting together a storage architecture that can help transfer 5+ TB/day of data to CIDR for thousands of enrollment stations and handling 100+ million authentications per day.
Malladi said, “We are contemplating a model wherein we can offer a single integrated boxed solution that addresses the business and technological challenges of this project. This integrated solution would include commodity hardware such as high-end servers (SMP 16 cores/node), storage technologies, deduplication and the like—integrated for a plug and play deployment.