Posted by Kaustubh Katdare on June 25, 2011
The AADHAR or UIDAI (aka Unique Identification Authority Of India) API (aka Application Programming Interface) has been released for software engineers free of cost. For the uninitiated, UIDAI is India’s ambitious project to identify every Indian citizen uniquely and provide them with an identification number which can be used across India to avail facilities and services. The project is being headed by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys – India’s leading IT services company.
The project has already began rolling out Ids to people and simultaneously aiming to create an ecosystem of software services around it. The UIDAI will provide a central authentication system to all the services in its ecosystem. Nilekani’s idea is to accelerate this process by opening the API to independent software developers and vendors. Developers will now be able to build applications that can authenticate users based on their AADHAR ID. Using this API, developers will be able to send the UID of a user to the servers and the server will respond with YES/NO. For added security in banking transactions, the API will also allow passing biometric information along with the unique ID.
UIDAI also provides with Demographic Authentication API which would be useful in verification of resident’s address. A typical application of demographic authentication API would be in issuing of credit card where the bank needs to verify the applicant’s residential address.Mr. Sanjay Jain who is the chief product manager of AADHAR said that they have identified several vendors and agencies to take care of various functions thus enabling UIDAI to execute the project more smoothly without any interference. Those who wish to learn more about the API may refer to the following link -
AADHAR Authentication API Specification 1.2
UIDAI also provides with Demographic Authentication API which would be useful in verification of resident’s address. A typical application of demographic authentication API would be in issuing of credit card where the bank needs to verify the applicant’s residential address.Mr. Sanjay Jain who is the chief product manager of AADHAR said that they have identified several vendors and agencies to take care of various functions thus enabling UIDAI to execute the project more smoothly without any interference. Those who wish to learn more about the API may refer to the following link -
AADHAR Authentication API Specification 1.2