Aadhar or UID

In the last few weeks Aadhar or UID project is under lots of scrutiny. The question today is “to be or not to be” a part of this process. Although I am not a big fan of Aadhar card but some where I feel it’s very important to have a UID number allocated to all legitimate citizen of India. 

Let’s look at this from technical perspective. We need to have a centralized database for citizen of India and UID will be the primary key of that database. So the question is what will happen to PAN Card, Voters Id card, Passport etc? The secondary question is how this UID can be linked with other services used by the citizen like telephone, internet, cooking gas etc?

The solutions to these questions can be arrived by a two step process:

1) Existing Citizens

The government should first create a web site(secured) where people can voluntarily declare their PAN/PASSPORT/VOTER CARD details through online registration. For rural sector they can do the same through BDO offices and Panchayats. Once these data is filled then government should verify the data(along with citizenship authentication) and issue an UID to the user(online).

Once this is done the user can declare his birth certificate number/ marriage registration / phone / bank / cooking gas details in the same site. Since every facility is attached with identification document which is collected by the service provider so the government can ask the service provider to link those accounts with this UID.

Thus at the end of the process all the physical entities will become attached with UID of the person. Off course this will require verification and validation but atleast most documents would become traceable.

The last step should be voluntary collection of biometrics and adding them against this UID. This process should take huge time considering the population of India.

2) New Citizens

The government should ensure that all person born after a certain date should get an UID along with birth certificate so that when the person grows up all his documents can automatically be linked to his UID.This will ensure that after 50 years or so all Indian citizen will be covered under UID. This will also solve the citizenship issue.

The simplified case study diagram should look like this. Although in real life it will be more complex matrix.

This is a simplified solution to a big problem. Data collation and data mining will be a huge part of this project but then again if there is a will then there is always away out. This process will take time but will ensure that all of us have UID and we become accountable.