UID: Technology sophistication and challenges

BANGALORE, INDIA: Waiting for the biggest roll-out ever for an ID project, the UIDAI will face a tough road ahead from the security and implementation aspect.

Describing the roadmap of the UID project, at the Leadership Series - Vision 2020 organized by BangaloreIT.biz here today, Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) said, it is for the first time that such a project is happening in such a large scale.

“We would have a lot of challenges from the security, technology, implementation side, to some extent even the political side, but if done as planned, it would be worth the effort,” he said.

The UID is a complex project with technology sophistication and scale of 1.2 billion people. The department would work on private-public partnership (PPP) model for various tasks and process. The UIDAI will be the regulatory authority managing a central ID Data Repository (CIDR) which will issue UID numbers, update resident information and authenticate the identity of the residents as required.

The CIDR will perform a search key demographic field on the biometrics for each new enrollment, to ensure no duplicates exist. It would have a massive de-duplication system in the software so that the individual would have only one chance to submit correct information.

Interestingly, India has a population of superstitious people, who believe in number power. In an answer to that Nilekani said that the UID number will have no intelligence and there won't be any special provision to get a desired number. It would be randomly generated to avoid any security breach.

The department would work on contracts with the agencies to maintain the security of the citizen data and would not allow anyone get the access to data in the online authentication.

The biometric samples would be recorded through mobile phones that have biometric readers and can be worked over low bandwidth platform and open APIs from mobile. The entire system would ensure a robust security system in place for fraud detection, audit trails.

He highlighted that the department would have memory search, online authentication on cloud, optimized network and since the website would be a read only site, it would avoid server lags.

There would be diverse sets of enrolling point, but uniform process and software for the systems.

UIDAI is looking at multiple partnerships like a consultant committee, data standard system, NGO’s, legal aid to check the legalities.

According to Nandan Nilekani, the entire roll-out would require massive computational process which is a big challenge.