Dhritiman Ray,TNN | Nov 28, 2015, 07.59 PM IST
RANCHI: India is ready to share its Aadhar program data with other nations for identification processes if it is approached, former director general of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Ram Sevak Sharma said in Ranchi on Saturday.
The current Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chairperson, Sharma, who was also one of the initial minds behind the Aadhar program and headed UIDAI till 2013, said Centre is open to the idea of assisting other countries on working on similar projects. "We are open to sharing our technology, which is nearly 99.76% accurate," he said while interacting with the students of Indian Institute of Management- Ranchi (IIM-R) here. "Our Prime Minister is interested in the prospect and wants it to be outsourced," he added. The Jharkhand batch IAS officer who served as the chief secretary of state during 2013-14, said the new technology, which is world's best digital identity infrastructure, has the potential to dominate the digital scene of the world in coming years.
The Aadhar program, which has already included 93 crore citizens since its inception in 2009, will also take over from private corporations from controlling the identity, Sharma said. "For instance, every online transaction we do is being controlled by Visa and mastercard. We will not allow that to happen here with our Aadhar program," he said, adding that Aadhar will become a platform for several applications in future.
Admitting there are chances of non Indian citizens obtaining UIN numbers because of its bare essentials, Sharma said the very requirement of the technology was to create an identity of people. "The Aadhar card has been devised to create an identity. It is not meant for authenticating the citizenship, caste, creed or religion of an individual," he added.
Explaining the efficiency of Aadhar program to IIM-R students, Sharma said the database is designed to make one million authentications every minute. At present, the database authenticates three million Aadhar cards every day.