DC | 30th Jun 2013
Bengaluru: Nandan Nilekani’s big idea, the Aadhaar number, is gaining both adherents and “allies” as the numbers of people with a unique identity grow rapidly – some 800,000 to a million people are enrolling for the UID daily.
After various departments of the Indian government have hitched on the Aadhaar for ‘know your customer’ requirements and, increasingly, transactions, foreign embassies are now exploring the possibility of using the Aadhaar number to simplify their visa processes.
Nilekani, who mentioned the development during a during a talk at IIM-B on Saturday, said that the UID Authority had had “preliminary discussions” with some embassies, but hastened to add that the Aadhaar only authenticates identity but is not proof of citizenship.
“They (consulates) can look up the Aadhaar number, since they require verification of one's identity. However, it is only an idea at this stage, and I can't comment much about it.”
UID to enable p2p money transfer
S. Raghotham | DC
After enabling the government’s direct transfer of benefits scheme, the Aadhaar number will next enable individuals to transfer money to other individuals on mobile phones. Unique Identity Authority of India chairman Nandan Nilekani told Deccan Chronicle on the sidelines of a conference in the city that he expects the service to start in September.
Delivering the industry keynote at the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) conference on ‘Grand Successes and Failures in IT’ at IIM-Bangalore on Saturday, Nilekani acknowledged that there were many challenges in getting the project off the ground, that there had been errors in execution and, consequently, learnings.
“The first question was: can you do a billion+ people? We have cracked that. We have cracked the technology for that, the business model is done. The trick was to evolve a simple, minimalistic, non-threatening design”, Nilekani said, adding that execution, nonetheless, could have been better.
“We have a huge backlog of enrolments for which cards have to be sent out, the UID law is yet to be passed by Parliament, and we have to make it sustainable and irreversible. But we are on the right track.”
Asked whether he still worried that the UID project may fall through, given its scale – it’s the world’s largest identity project – he quoted former US President Ronald Reagan’s quip on the US’ fiscal deficit in the 1980s, “I am not worried about it. It’s big enough to take care of itself”.
Nilekani also spoke about other Aadhaar-based applications in the works: a system of Micro-ATMs that would be accessible to rural populations; personal ‘digital vaults’, based on the Aadhaar digital ID in the Cloud, in which people could store their credit histories, health histories, degree certificates and other digital assets and release them securely to service providers when they need to; and, perhaps, mobility and choice for people in terms of where they access public services – for instance, today, one has to go to a particular PDS shop to get rations, but with Aadhaar, if one PDS shop does not provide good service, people can go to another.
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