Long, hard road ahead for UIDAI: Nilekani

With the first phase of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) exercise aiming to give unique identification to 600 million residents of the country in next four years and its possible use in improving the public distribution system (PDS), the authority chairman Nandan Nilekani said on Friday that the journey will be "long" and "tough".

At the same time, Nilekani expressed satisfaction over the pace of the project, now named Aadhar, and said the UIDAI was on "the right track".

The authority, which has been set up to provide a unique 12-digit number to each resident of the country, aims to roll out the first number between August 2010 and February 2011.

"It is a very complex project and what we are going to do now (issuance of first Aadhaar number) is only a start. We have promised that we will have 600 million enrolled in the next four and half years. It is going to be a long tough journey,'' the former chief of information technology company Infosys said on the sidelines of a function in New Delhi.

Talking about the recently introduced working paper on role of the 12-digit unique number 'Aadhaar' in revamping the PDS, Nilekani said, "PDS reform is a very important priority for the government and we think that if we able to give every resident a 'Aadhaar' number, that will help in reducing duplicates and fraud in the database of people.''

He added, "That is one part. The other part is that if you can bring in online authentication at the point of service delivery then you can make it a demand-led system. As in when people get ration, it is reduced from the inventory of the PDS, which can be then replenished from the supply chain. So basically it becomes a demand-led model. It also gives the person the choice to go to any PDS shop."

Later in an interview with Bloomberg, Nilekani elaborated, ''This one is about inclusion because a lot of people who don't have any form of identity are being left out of so many things. There are 75 million homeless people who don't have access to any public services. There are hundreds and millions of migrants who don't get services when they migrate. So, this is a very powerful tool for them.