Wall Street Journal
India's vaunted tech savvy is being put to the test this week as the country embarks on a daunting mission: assigning a unique 12-digit number to each of its 1.2 billion people.
The project, which seeks to collect fingerprint and iris scans from all residents and store them in a massive central database of unique IDs, is considered by many specialists the most technologically and logistically complex national identification effort ever attempted. To pull it off, India has recruited tech gurus of Indian origin from around the world, including the co-founder of online photo service Snapfish and employees from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Intel Corp.
The country's leaders are pinning their hopes on the program to solve development problems that have persisted despite fast economic growth. They say unique ID numbers will help ensure that government welfare spending reaches the right people, and will allow hundreds of millions of poor Indians to access services like banking for the first time.
Critics question whether the project can have as big an impact as its backers promise, given that identity fraud is but one contributor to India's development struggles. Civil-liberties groups say the government is collecting too much personal information without sufficient safeguards. The technology requires transferring large amounts of data between the hinterland and an urban database, leading some to question whether the system will succumb to India's rickety Internet infrastructure.
The sign-up effort is already under way in a handful of districts, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to kick off nationwide enrollment Wednesday. The government hopes to issue the first 100 million unique ID numbers by March and 600 million within four years. The undertaking is the latest chance for India to show it can pull off a massive project after what is widely viewed as its mishandling of next week's Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, where infrastructure and hygiene issues led some nations to threaten withdrawing.