Entire Karnataka to get UID numbers by Dec 2011

BANGALORE, INDIA: The test phase of Unique Identity project, which started in two districts of Karnataka, namely Tumkur and Mysore, is being completed today.

This will be followed by a state-wide roll out of the UID number, which is scheduled to be completed by December 2011.

Covering a population of nearly 5.3 crore, in a span of one year, the state’s e-governance department will be responsible for collecting the data and sending it to the central database, which would go for the de-duplication check and respond back with Aadhar identity or the UID number.

At present the team is busy winding up the Proof of Concept (POC) for UID.

“We are finishing the second phase and final phase of the pilot (proof of concept) today. It covered around 25,000 people from 10 villages; five each in Tumkur and Mysore,” said M N Vidyashankar, Principal Secretary, Department of e-governance, Karnataka.

Under the POC, the team went for the first round of data collection, which covered 25,000 people. It included collection of biometrics like ten fingerprints, iris and other details like name, address, gender, occupation.

In the second phase, the same information was collected again from scratch, from the same people. According to Vidyashankar, this procedure is adopted to check the variances that might occur during data collection.

Also, the entire data would go through de-duplication at Delhi as 50,000 identities. The expected result should show that all of the new 25,000 data is duplicate and already available with the database.

“If this POC gets a green signal from the authorities, we would start with the data collection for the entire population of the two districts from mid-July, and five or six months after that, we would initiate the state-wide roll out,” he added.

In order to cover the 53 lakh population of the two districts, the department, in collaboration with Comat Technologies, would set up around 700 centers for registration. The team would be using the UID software which is built by the internal technical team at UID.

The second version of this software, which was partially built in collaboration with third-party vendors, is being used in the pilot project that is going simultaneously at Medak and Krishna districts in Andhra Pradesh.

The performance of the two would determine which is accepted by the center for the nationwide functioning of the UID centers.