Karnataka pioneers UID pilots

The test phase of Unique Identity project, which started in two districts of
Karnataka, namely Tumkur and Mysore, is being completed.

This will be followed by a state wide rollout of the UID number, which is
scheduled to be completed by December 2011.

Covering a population of nearly 5.3 crore, in a span of one year, the states
e-governance department will be responsible for collecting the data and sending
it to the central database, which would go for the de-duplication check and
respond back with Aadhar identity or the UID number.

At present, the team is busy winding up the Proof of Concept (PoC) for UID.

"We are finishing the second phase and final phase of the pilot (proof of
concept). It covered around 25,000 people from ten villages; five each in Tumkur
and Mysore," says MN Vidyashankar, principal secretary, Department of
e-governance, Karnataka.

Under the PoC, the team went for the first round of data collection, which
covered 25,000 people. It included collection of biometrics like ten
fingerprints, iris and other details like name, address, gender, occupation.

In the second phase, the same information was collected again from scratch,
from the same people. According to Vidyashankar, this procedure is adopted to
check the variances that might occur during data collection.

Also, the entire data would go through de-duplication at Delhi as 50,000
identities. The expected result should show that all the new 25,000 data is
duplicate and already available with the database.

"If this POC gets a green signal from the authorities, we would start with
the data collection for the entire population of the two districts from
mid-July; and five or six months after that, we would initiate the state wide
rollout," he adds.

In order to cover the 53 lakh population of the two districts, the
department, in collaboration with Comat Technologies, would set up around 700
centers for registration. The team would be using the UID software which is
built by the internal technical team at UID.

The second version of this software, which was partially built in
collaboration with third-party vendors, is being used in the pilot project that
is going on simultaneously at Medak and Krishna districts in Andhra Pradesh. The
performance of the two would determine which is accepted by the center for the
nationwide functioning of the UID centers.

Akanksha Prasad/CIOL

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