India UUID program

Last month, Govt. of India roped in Infosys co-chairman Nandan Nilekani to head one of the most prestigious e-gov iniatives Unique Identification program. Under this program the unique id will be provided to every citizen of India.So, in order to run this program in a professional way, India's priminster request Mr. Nilekani to head this prestigious project. Mr. Nilekani without any doubt accepted the offer and step down as the co-chairman of Infosys.

But though India's prime minster Dr Manmohan Singh tried to make this program bureaucratic free, by giving Mr. Nilekani a rank of a Cabinet minister. But this project in itself comes with lot of chalenges. The chalenges which I can identify are :

1. Data collection : India has a population of more than 1 Billion people, spread in rural and urban areas of India, though demographic data is maintained but its never consistent.

2. Data maintenance : Nilekani team has to think how data consistency can be maintained. What will happen when a person is born, when he/she is dead, when somebody submit his/her citizenship, when somebody takes a new Indian Citizenship, what happen in case of dual citizenship? Though there are some dept. who still handle this data, but there are no dept. for other stuff.

3. Forgery : If you have "Juggad", then any thing can be possible in India, from passport, driving license, fake documents anything, so this is the top most uphill task which Nilekani and his team has to take in and how this Jugaad technology can be avoided in this national level presitgious project.

4. Secuirty : Once the data is ready, then this data will be shared to different govt. dept.,but how the govt. can ensure the data security.

Though there are many other challenges which certainly will be coming in the way of Mr. Nilekani when he finally come out with his draft version for this project.

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Thanks&Regards,
Mohit