Unique ID Project
By VK Singh
About the Project: Aadhar, as the Unique ID project is now branded, is a central mission mode project aimed at creating a national citizen database. First conceptualized in 2003 under the NDA rule as a project aimed at tightening security and immigration. But the UID Authority of today was approved in November 2008 by an Empowered Group of Ministers during UPA rules, with a completely different objective: to help accelerate the process of financial inclusion, the most important political agenda item of the UPA. Since Nandan Nilekani took over the chairmanship of the Authority in July last year, thing have moved very fast and the first set of numbers are likely to be issued by October on a pilot basis. While the actual issuing would start from February, in the next five years, it plans to issue some 600 mn such numbers. Operating today under the planning commission, in July, the government brought National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010 to make the UID Authority a statutory body.
Outlay: The government has so far allocated Rs 7,000 crore for the Unique ID project, of which a significant part would go to IT.
In July there were reports that more than 50% budget has been cut by the government, which the finance ministry later denied. The FY11 budget has a provision for Rs 1,900 crore for the project. In addition to the money spent by the UID Authority, the registrarsso far a few state governments, oil marketing companies, and banks have signed MoUs with UIDAI to be the registrars will spend money on enrollment agencies. So, the overall spend on IT on account of Unique ID would be far more than what the Authority itself would spend. The total contract value of the IT projects that Authority would award in the first phase is likely to cross Rs 1,000 crore.
IT Contracts Awarded: In this short-time the Unique ID Authority has already selected a few IT vendors. The first contract the applications development and maintenance contract valued at Rs 20-25 crore went to MindTree. It was followed by the call center partner contract, which Intelenet, India's No 2 domestic BPO firm bagged. More recently, the authority announced that the biometric solutions contract has been distributed among three consortia one led by Accenture with Mindtree and biometric provider of Daon of Ireland; one a consortium of Mahindra Satyam and French-based Morpho (Safran group), and one a consortium led by US-based L1 Identity Solutions and Hewlett-Packard India. Together, the contracts are estimated to be Rs 200 crore initially. While these are officially announced, sources say Bharti Airtel has been selected as the provider of data center solutions. And TCS has apparently been selected to create its website. The two big parts the managed services provider that is estimated to be between Rs 500 crore to Rs 1,000 crore would be awarded anytime soon, as the bidding is on.
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