Infosys Co- Chairman Nandan Nilekani has been appointed by the government to head the National ID Card Project and will step down from the company’s board. Nilekani would be given status of a Cabinet Minister.The UIDAI, an entity under the Planning Commission, has been constituted to provide national identity cards to Indian citizens.Nilakeni said the government was still to work out the costing of the project, adding the plan was to roll out UIDs within 12 -18 months.The big issue of this project is that we need to have one central data base which ultimately will have details of a billion residents of India and that apart from their information about their names, address, date of birth and so forth, will also have to store bio-metric information about them, maybe finger prints, or facial picture etc. because the bio-metric is what is going to ensure that we don’t have duplication of people in the database.
Under the UIDAI programme, unique identification cards would be provided to citizens by 2011. In the beginning, the cards will be assigned to all voters by building on current electoral roll data. The other big challenge is the inter-operability is whether the Citizen card is issued which are co-branded with MNIC or Pan card, as far as the identity part of it goes, it should get authenticated in the same way all over the country so there is a lot of co-ordination that is required both across central government as well as local governments, so the complexity is mainly of co-ordination and inter-operability which we have to encourage.
As co-founder of the $4.6-billion global software major, Nilekani served as a director since the company's inception in 1981. He was the chief executive and managing director from March 2002 to June 2007 and was re-designated as the co-chairman of the company's board.
