By Kumar Sankar Roy Sept 30th 2011
One year on history's most ambitious human mapping exercise gains momentum.
On September 29 last year Aadhaar opened for business with granting the unique identity number to 10 people of northern Maharashtra’s Tembhali village. One year down the line, the Nilekani- headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has given out Aadhaar cards to 38.4 million Indians across the country.
Enrolment is taking place across India, but nowhere has the draw been as active as in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. All three states have seen people making a beeline for the card.
In Andhra Pradesh the number of Aadhaar holders has already topped 10 million. The national capital, Delhi, also has seen over a million numbered. Over 80 million people, including children, have been enrolled and the process of issuing the card is on.
Anyone can get the card, though the focus for now is on the poor and marginalised sections that need an identity the most.
History’s most ambitious human mapping endeavour had a small beginning in the shape of a pilot project in Patancheru, a small town in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh, in August last year. It seeks to give every citizen of India a unique number (UID) that works everywhere as the final arbiter of who a person is.
The process begins with obtaining information from citizens about name, year of birth and residential addr-ess. Next, a scanner records their fingerprints. In the next step a scanner captures details of their iris of their eyes. This is as unique as fingerprint.
A 12-digit number on a piece of paper is handed out. In the final step, if everything goes well, a credit card sized card bearing your details and picture arrives at your doorstep. It takes a 400-strong team at UIDAI and its various partners to do all that.
UIDAI was set up in Janaury 2009 as an attached office of the planning commission. It had an initial core team of 115 officers and staff.
Aadhaar will do a lot of things eventually. For now, you can get a domestic LPG cooking gas connection by producing the letter of allotment of Aadhaar numbers as proof of identity and address.
Recently, RBI decided to accept such letters as an valid document for opening bank accounts without the limitations applicable to ‘small’ accounts.
Aadhaar is aimed at inclusion of all. The necessity for being included is identity, says UIDAI chairman Nilekani. Since it was set up and till June this year, his organisation has spent Rs 331 crore, Rs 86 crore of this on establishment, Rs 95 crore as assistance to registrars for enrolling citizens and Rs 45 crore on information technology. Top UIDAI officials calculate spends in a simpler way: assuming a spend of Rs 50 per successful enrolment, the 80 million enrolments mean a total spending of about Rs 400 crore.
RS Sharma, the chief executive officer of the UID project (also director- general and mission director of UIDAI), believes that by 2014 over 600 million Indians will have been enrolled. That’s half of India’s population. The short-term target is 200 million by March 2012.
“These are feasible targets. It could happen earlier but one has to be fair,” says Sharma. He adds in a lighter vein that once India’s 1.2 billion are identified, replicating the process for the rest of the world may not be that big a problem. “They will be four to five times more. It is possible.”
At the foundation of UID project is scalability and technology. But controversies have surrounded the project too. Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys who left the company to deliver his UID brainchild, is under a sharpened focus after the Planning Commission circulated note that said UIDAI expenses need to be monitored.
The commission may or may not succeed in this, but the fact is Nilekani and his top aides have so far been successful in doing what they set out to do. They have so fine-tuned the process that it can be scaled up to cover millions of individuals. The proof is in the numbers already covered.
It has been reported that the Planning Commission’s note has argued that since the expenses of the UIDAI are not routed through it, there is a need for separate financial advisor.
To that Nilekani’s reply is: Everything is transparent. Media reports have said that there have been suggestions from people in other ministries that the project could be done at a lower cost, that the quality of data captured in the UID card is not reliable and that the project may not be doing as well as it should.
On the design side, UIDAI has developed the Aadhaar application with the help of service providers. Next come the registrars who actually help in the enrolment. They are essentially public and private organisations already engaged in providing services to Indians and operate on behalf of UIDAI.
Registrars are also authenticators, and use the authentication inter-faces to confirm details of citizens who may have already enrolled in the UIDAI system. The enrolment agencies who do the actual enrolment work are contracted for the job by the registrar, subject to certification by UIDAI. In the last leg are citizens who enroll. Today there are 20,000 enrolment stations collecting data that ultimately lead to the unique 12-digit identification number.
On the technology front UIDAI has built a system which in itself is unique. At the core is a central ID data repository (CIDR). The application hosted by CIDR can be broadly categorised into core applications and supporting applications. In the core category there are the enrolment and authentication application services. The supporting category consists of applications required for administration, analytics, reporting, fraud detection interfaces to the logistics provider and call-centre and the portal. The second piece in this humongous exercise is the biometric components that assist in processes such as de-duplication and sub-system verification within the authentication server.
The first company to get involved in the project was Wipro, and not Infosys. Wipro prepared a strategic vision of the UIDAI project and submitted it to a processes committee. “We envisaged the close linkage that UIDAI would have to the electoral database,” says a top Wipro official.
Though the UID project has been fathered by Niklekani, it was felt as far back as 2007 that India needs such a system. An empowered group of ministers in November that year officially stated the need for creating an identity- related resident database. This could be a new collection of data or built on an existing database such as the voter list.
In June 2010, mid-sized IT firm MindTree secured the application development and maintenance services contract of the UID project. A multi-crore project, MindTree’s work involved services across the application lifecycle -- from designing, developing, testing, maintaining and supporting the Aadhaar application to providing help- desk services from UIDAI's Bangalore technology centre.
Soon, consulting firm Accenture also got involved in the implementation of the core biometric identification system, a key element of the Aadhaar programme.
The fingerprint and iris scans have not gone down too well with some experts. M Hanmandlu, a professor at IIT Delhi’s electrical engineering department, is one of them. He should know because he is into research of multi-modal biometrics such as face, iris and ears together.
“The need of the hour is to develop a technology that works in the changing environment, whereas UIDAI till now has been working in a controlled environment. So, there is a need for an upgrade of technology. The problem with minutia technology for thumbprint is that it has lots of flaws. UIDAI should also look at number-based identification rather than feature-based identification it uses now,” says Hanmandlu.
As the number of digitally mapped Indians rises, the need to outsource is stro-nger. Right now, UIDAI is using registrars who may have the basic demographic information of citizens and who confirm the relevant fields and seek biometric information for each citizen enrolling.
After collecting and de-duplicating the biometric information, a unique ID database is created. UIDAI has also hired a data centre on rent. Besides office infrastructure, the entities which put up applications for UIDAI in the front-end as well as the back-end are also being paid.
To simplify this structure, UIDAI is in the process of appointing a managed services provider (MSP) which will serve as a single- point of contact for all this work, with UIDAI monitoring it. This entity will be selected in two months. With the size of the deal estimated to run into hundreds of crores, most top players have put in bids.
As UID is dependent on technology and personal data, security as well as usage of such have been a concern to some. Social activists such as Gopal Krishna of Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties have often raised questions about this. In an open letter to Sonia Gandhi in September 2010 and later to different high-ranking officials, the forum has tried to explain why it opposes UID.
“The UID number is a rare project which has unleashed the concept of massively organised information as means of social control, a weapon of war, and for the victimisation of ethnic groups, minorities and political adversaries. It appears that Nilekani, the co-founder and former chief executive of Infosys.., has misled the key functionaries of the government of India into believing that he is deeply concerned about reaching the poorest of the poor with a 16-digit card to liberate them from poverty,” said the letter.
The forum argues that UID’s centralised database of unique identification numbers to be issued to all citizens fails to make provisions to prevent the abuse of data and invasion of their right to privacy and freedom of choice by national and transnational corporations.
UIDAI’s top official vehemently denies this. They say that the authority is barred from revealing personal information contained in the Aadhaar database. The only response permitted is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to requests to verify an identity, says R S Sharma. The only exceptions allowed will be if an order comes from a law court or a joint secretary in a case involving national security. This approach is also in line with security norms followed in the US and Europe on access to data in the case of security threat. “All this talk about social profiling and conspiracy theories are just speculation,” Sharma adds.
But what if and when the UIDAI database is connected to others? The official version is that the UID database is not linked to any other database or to information held in other databases. Its only purpose is to verify a person’s identity at the point of receiving a service, and that too with the consent of the Aadhaar number holder.
Enrolment is taking place across India, but nowhere has the draw been as active as in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. All three states have seen people making a beeline for the card.
In Andhra Pradesh the number of Aadhaar holders has already topped 10 million. The national capital, Delhi, also has seen over a million numbered. Over 80 million people, including children, have been enrolled and the process of issuing the card is on.
Anyone can get the card, though the focus for now is on the poor and marginalised sections that need an identity the most.
History’s most ambitious human mapping endeavour had a small beginning in the shape of a pilot project in Patancheru, a small town in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh, in August last year. It seeks to give every citizen of India a unique number (UID) that works everywhere as the final arbiter of who a person is.
The process begins with obtaining information from citizens about name, year of birth and residential addr-ess. Next, a scanner records their fingerprints. In the next step a scanner captures details of their iris of their eyes. This is as unique as fingerprint.
A 12-digit number on a piece of paper is handed out. In the final step, if everything goes well, a credit card sized card bearing your details and picture arrives at your doorstep. It takes a 400-strong team at UIDAI and its various partners to do all that.
UIDAI was set up in Janaury 2009 as an attached office of the planning commission. It had an initial core team of 115 officers and staff.
Aadhaar will do a lot of things eventually. For now, you can get a domestic LPG cooking gas connection by producing the letter of allotment of Aadhaar numbers as proof of identity and address.
Recently, RBI decided to accept such letters as an valid document for opening bank accounts without the limitations applicable to ‘small’ accounts.
Aadhaar is aimed at inclusion of all. The necessity for being included is identity, says UIDAI chairman Nilekani. Since it was set up and till June this year, his organisation has spent Rs 331 crore, Rs 86 crore of this on establishment, Rs 95 crore as assistance to registrars for enrolling citizens and Rs 45 crore on information technology. Top UIDAI officials calculate spends in a simpler way: assuming a spend of Rs 50 per successful enrolment, the 80 million enrolments mean a total spending of about Rs 400 crore.
RS Sharma, the chief executive officer of the UID project (also director- general and mission director of UIDAI), believes that by 2014 over 600 million Indians will have been enrolled. That’s half of India’s population. The short-term target is 200 million by March 2012.
“These are feasible targets. It could happen earlier but one has to be fair,” says Sharma. He adds in a lighter vein that once India’s 1.2 billion are identified, replicating the process for the rest of the world may not be that big a problem. “They will be four to five times more. It is possible.”
At the foundation of UID project is scalability and technology. But controversies have surrounded the project too. Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys who left the company to deliver his UID brainchild, is under a sharpened focus after the Planning Commission circulated note that said UIDAI expenses need to be monitored.
The commission may or may not succeed in this, but the fact is Nilekani and his top aides have so far been successful in doing what they set out to do. They have so fine-tuned the process that it can be scaled up to cover millions of individuals. The proof is in the numbers already covered.
It has been reported that the Planning Commission’s note has argued that since the expenses of the UIDAI are not routed through it, there is a need for separate financial advisor.
To that Nilekani’s reply is: Everything is transparent. Media reports have said that there have been suggestions from people in other ministries that the project could be done at a lower cost, that the quality of data captured in the UID card is not reliable and that the project may not be doing as well as it should.
On the design side, UIDAI has developed the Aadhaar application with the help of service providers. Next come the registrars who actually help in the enrolment. They are essentially public and private organisations already engaged in providing services to Indians and operate on behalf of UIDAI.
Registrars are also authenticators, and use the authentication inter-faces to confirm details of citizens who may have already enrolled in the UIDAI system. The enrolment agencies who do the actual enrolment work are contracted for the job by the registrar, subject to certification by UIDAI. In the last leg are citizens who enroll. Today there are 20,000 enrolment stations collecting data that ultimately lead to the unique 12-digit identification number.
On the technology front UIDAI has built a system which in itself is unique. At the core is a central ID data repository (CIDR). The application hosted by CIDR can be broadly categorised into core applications and supporting applications. In the core category there are the enrolment and authentication application services. The supporting category consists of applications required for administration, analytics, reporting, fraud detection interfaces to the logistics provider and call-centre and the portal. The second piece in this humongous exercise is the biometric components that assist in processes such as de-duplication and sub-system verification within the authentication server.
The first company to get involved in the project was Wipro, and not Infosys. Wipro prepared a strategic vision of the UIDAI project and submitted it to a processes committee. “We envisaged the close linkage that UIDAI would have to the electoral database,” says a top Wipro official.
Though the UID project has been fathered by Niklekani, it was felt as far back as 2007 that India needs such a system. An empowered group of ministers in November that year officially stated the need for creating an identity- related resident database. This could be a new collection of data or built on an existing database such as the voter list.
In June 2010, mid-sized IT firm MindTree secured the application development and maintenance services contract of the UID project. A multi-crore project, MindTree’s work involved services across the application lifecycle -- from designing, developing, testing, maintaining and supporting the Aadhaar application to providing help- desk services from UIDAI's Bangalore technology centre.
Soon, consulting firm Accenture also got involved in the implementation of the core biometric identification system, a key element of the Aadhaar programme.
The fingerprint and iris scans have not gone down too well with some experts. M Hanmandlu, a professor at IIT Delhi’s electrical engineering department, is one of them. He should know because he is into research of multi-modal biometrics such as face, iris and ears together.
“The need of the hour is to develop a technology that works in the changing environment, whereas UIDAI till now has been working in a controlled environment. So, there is a need for an upgrade of technology. The problem with minutia technology for thumbprint is that it has lots of flaws. UIDAI should also look at number-based identification rather than feature-based identification it uses now,” says Hanmandlu.
As the number of digitally mapped Indians rises, the need to outsource is stro-nger. Right now, UIDAI is using registrars who may have the basic demographic information of citizens and who confirm the relevant fields and seek biometric information for each citizen enrolling.
After collecting and de-duplicating the biometric information, a unique ID database is created. UIDAI has also hired a data centre on rent. Besides office infrastructure, the entities which put up applications for UIDAI in the front-end as well as the back-end are also being paid.
To simplify this structure, UIDAI is in the process of appointing a managed services provider (MSP) which will serve as a single- point of contact for all this work, with UIDAI monitoring it. This entity will be selected in two months. With the size of the deal estimated to run into hundreds of crores, most top players have put in bids.
As UID is dependent on technology and personal data, security as well as usage of such have been a concern to some. Social activists such as Gopal Krishna of Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties have often raised questions about this. In an open letter to Sonia Gandhi in September 2010 and later to different high-ranking officials, the forum has tried to explain why it opposes UID.
“The UID number is a rare project which has unleashed the concept of massively organised information as means of social control, a weapon of war, and for the victimisation of ethnic groups, minorities and political adversaries. It appears that Nilekani, the co-founder and former chief executive of Infosys.., has misled the key functionaries of the government of India into believing that he is deeply concerned about reaching the poorest of the poor with a 16-digit card to liberate them from poverty,” said the letter.
The forum argues that UID’s centralised database of unique identification numbers to be issued to all citizens fails to make provisions to prevent the abuse of data and invasion of their right to privacy and freedom of choice by national and transnational corporations.
UIDAI’s top official vehemently denies this. They say that the authority is barred from revealing personal information contained in the Aadhaar database. The only response permitted is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to requests to verify an identity, says R S Sharma. The only exceptions allowed will be if an order comes from a law court or a joint secretary in a case involving national security. This approach is also in line with security norms followed in the US and Europe on access to data in the case of security threat. “All this talk about social profiling and conspiracy theories are just speculation,” Sharma adds.
But what if and when the UIDAI database is connected to others? The official version is that the UID database is not linked to any other database or to information held in other databases. Its only purpose is to verify a person’s identity at the point of receiving a service, and that too with the consent of the Aadhaar number holder.
