By Krithika Krishnamurthy, Malavika Murali & Peerzada Abrar, ET Bureau | 15 Jan, 2015, 12.47PM IST
BENGALURU: The makers of Aadhaar are looking past the stiff-collared professionals to young technologists clad in casual attire, to be the saving-grace of the world's largest identity database.
Last week, a group of 140 people mostly entrepreneurs, IT professionals and students - thronged the country's first hackathon dedicated to innovating the Aadhaar platform.
While most of the participants looked at using the biometric profile of citizens prepared by the Unique Identification Authority of India ( UIDAI) under the Aadhaar project for authentication for government services, Varun Rajamane, a 12th grader, was looking at a more realistic problem: If you can have attendance apps for government employees, why not one for universities? With that, one could analyse attendance, figure which are the classes that students bunk the most and find out why.
For instance, the staffers could strategically place an interesting class post lunch and push the heavy concepts to early morning.
"It's an app to improve the education system in India," said Rajamane, who studies at Indus International School and the youngest hacker present at the hackathon.
It is people like him that the authorities are rooting for. "The platform is capable of doing millions of transactions and these transactions can happen by more and more apps being developed. We have to have a large number of stakeholders," said Vijay S Madan, directorgeneral and mission director of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). "We will be a catalyst to pro vide technical support and fi nancial support."
Aadhaar is a 12-digit individ ual identification number is sued by Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on behalf of the Indian govern ment.
"You cannot understate the importance of that 12th grade kid who comes up with the idea, because it is completely out-of-the-box and no one's told him you have to think like this," said Srikanth Nadha muni, the chief executive offi cer and cofounder of Khosla Labs, where the hackathon was conducted in collaboration with IT lobby group Nasscom
At a time when women's safety has become an issue for transportation providers, 24year-old IT professional Asmita Metrewar was building an application that could retrieve background information of a driver from multiple sources and present it to the passenger before boarding the vehicle.
Husband-and-wife duo Abhijit and Madhu f banti Bhattacharjee, who both work at a technology company , are working to enable doc t tors and patients access healthcare data t through Aadhaar. The applications also aimed at giving hidden insights about the health of the country . c "Our goal is to launch a startup and provide this application as a service," said Madhubanti Bhattacharjee, 33.
Many students across the country , who pars ticipated in the hackathon, are also planning to turn their ideas into startups. Naresh Kommuri, 21, and Aneesh Kumar, 20, who study engineering at IIIT Nuzvid, travelled all the way from Andhra Pradesh to make an t application that will bring transparency and efficiency in public distribution system.
This included addressing the problem of I bogus cards, diversion of grains to black s market and bifurcation of fair-price shops. 3 Twenty-four-year old software engineers f Akhil Gundawar and Aman Gupta at online r payment company PayPal were building an c application to enable passengers to book and t cancel train tickets and refund the money in real time, based on a technology used in the s airline industry .
"We now have the technology , the critical mass of enrollments and the right political support, to carry such hackathons forward," said Ravi Gururaj, chairman of the Nasscom Product Council. A senior executive of Yodlee, an American inancial solutions provider, who requested anonymity , developed an application with wo other employees to crack the tedious ask of loan application approvals.
"Regardless of whether the application gets selected, it will be implemented in our ompany ," said the executive whose company offers solutions to banks, small and medium businesses, individuals and entrepreneurs. "It's a win-win situation for us," he aid.
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