UID project, also known as Aadhaar, provides unique identity number to everyone, which can be accessed and authenticated online. The project uses biometric cards to ensure no duplication occurs by the method of scanning 10 finger prints of two hands and also the iris of both the eyes.

“The most unique ID program”

“It’s the most unique ID program as the architecture is separate from various application modules. For enrollment, individual’s name, age, gender, date of birth, address along with 10 finger prints and two iris images would be sufficient enough for providing unique identity to people,” Nilekani said.

“User details such as name, age, gender, data of birth and address provides all information required for KYC norms, which can be utilized by government bodies for offering services like opening banking accounts and subsidiary of essential commodities like kerosene, fertilizer and food,” he added.

Also Read: 600 mn UID cards to be rolled out by 2014

Aadhaar has three de-duplication engines running in the back-end, built on a standard architecture for enrollment of data or information of people. It’s a highly scalable system both at front and back-end. The front-end can be scaled up by adding enrollment points, while servers can be added at the back-end.

Calling Aadhaar as India’s app store, Nilekani asked technology heads to leverage the project infrastructure and online platform to develop enterprise services for people based on application programming interfaces (APIs).

“The opportunities for offering services using Aadhaar are enormous and now it's up to you CIOs to utilize the capabilities,” Nilekani said, while addressing the third anniversary of CIO KLUB in Mumbai o Friday.

Powered by open source server architecture

Like any Internet providers, Aadhaar is powered by open source server architecture like MySQL, Hadoop and others and uses the smart feature of BI (business intelligence). It has two datacenters in Delhi and Bangalore, the former is the primary datacenter and the later is secondary.

Beside the project's complexity and challenges, Nilekani pointed out that there are social challenges as well.

“Crowd management for enrollment of old-age people, children, physically challenged and remote locations remains key challenges during enrollments... However, using technology fundamental social problems can be solved and the platform will enable for innovations,” he added.

UID project has issued 5.3 million Aadhaar cards till April 29, 2011 and was started last year on September 29. In just 14 months the platform of this project was rolled out and today it has a real-time portal to provide daily updates on the enrollment data across states.

Presently, about 100,000-200,000 enrollments are done everyday; however, Nilekani informed that it will reach one million per day by October this year and expect to touch 600 million by 2014.