Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today led a meeting with Unique Identity Authority of India chairman Nandan Nilekani, home minister P Chidambaram, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, and other senior members of the government over the issue of who would be responsible for collection of citizens' data under the ambitious UID programme.

However there was no immediate resolution of the turf war between Chidambaram's ministry of home affairs and Nilekani's UIDAI. The prime minister has scheduled a cabinet meeting for Friday after the Republic Day break.

While the Registrar General of India under the home ministry is mandated to carry out a regular census, the UIDAI, which comes under the Planning Commission's authority, has been collecting its own data on Indian residents with different parameters.

"I think we have come to an agreement on how both the projects can proceed together without difficulty ... the cabinet committee (on UIDAI) was rescheduled and will happen on Friday. We are quite hopeful that we will have a resolution of these issues in that meeting," Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia told newspersons after the meeting.

Besides Ahluwalia, today's meeting was also attended by National Security Advisor (NSA) Shivshankar Menon.

Ahluwalia said the home ministry's national population register (NPR) project for constructing a digital database of Indian residents could continue alongside the UIDAI project.

"We are moving towards a very satisfactory conclusion. I think that there is agreement that both the projects can move ahead and ways can be found that will avoid duplication. That was the key issue. I will send a supplementary note (to the cabinet in this regard)", he said.

The tussle between the two authorities has been making headlines over the past few days after Chidambaram wrote directly to the prime minister seeking clarity on who will be responsible for collecting citizens' biometric data - the Registrar-General of India under his ministry or the UIDAI.

Currently there seems to be considerable duplication between the two, as the RGI conducts regular census surveys to compile its national population register, while the UIDAI does the same thing separately.

The home secretary too wrote to the prime minister's secretary this week saying the data collected by the UIDAI was not reliable as anyone could get themselves registered under any name with any address.

The note also said that the UIDAI doesn't accept the ministry of home affairs' data as it sees the ministry as competition.

Nilekani has declined to comment on the controversy, other than saying the centre is discussing the various issues raised, both by the home ministry and the parliamentary standing committee on finance.

Earlier, the standing committee had recommended that the unique identification authority of India bill be reconsidered and reviewed. The Lok Sabha too rejected the UIDAI bill as presented by the government in the winter session ended recently.

The UIDAI, which has been mandated to issue a unique identification number to every Indian, plans to enrol nearly 60 per cent of the population into the database by 2014. Nearly 12 crore Aadhaar numbers have been generated so far.

On Friday, the Unique Identification Authority of India became the world's largest biometric database with close to 120 million records of Indian residents, beating similar databases maintained elsewhere in the world.

Political observers have divided opinions on the issue. Some insist that the UIDAI has wasted over Rs600 crore of public money so far with few tangible results; and the Registrar General's office does a more efficient job.

Others have frequently claimed that Nilekani, a former information technology chief executive, is the right man for the mammoth project of providing unique ID numbers to some 1.1 billion Indian denizens, but is being starved of funds and resources by the government.