Aadhar clocks impressive progress

BANGALORE: The UID number programme may have seen its share of turbulence in the past, but its success was still on course, as on Friday, nearly 12 crore Aadhar numbers were generated.Speaking to media persons at an interaction at their Technology Centre in the city, deputy director of Technology, UIDAI, Ashok Dalwai said that they were likely to see 12 crore Aadhar numbers generated by the end of Friday. “Once we have achieved this, we would be the worlds largest bio metric identification system in the world,” he said. They would continue with about two crore Aadhars per month. Adding that the authority were seeing an average of 1 million people enrolling per day across the 27,000 enrolment centres of the country, chairman of the project Nandan Nilekani said they would hit the 200 million mark next one month and touch the 600 million mark by 2014.Asserting that the project was going to be only an authentication of Identification, Head of Technology at UIDAI Srikant Nadhamuni, said that the current rate of failure was 0.14 per cent. Responding to queries on the total cost of the project, director general of the authority R S Sharma said, they estimated it to be `18,000 crore. “We calculated at a cost of `150 per person multiplied by the 120 crore population and `2.75 per person for de-duplication, which the lowest in the world,” he said and shared that since they did not purchased any hardware, ‘cost was reducing’.But the authority top brass seemed reluctant to share more information on concerns raised by the Ministry of Home and Public Accounts Committee. “The matter is before the Cabinet and in the next meet, a decision will be taken,” Nilekani said. They also shared that they had a feature wherein an ‘introducer’, with an Aadhar number could vouch for an individual who did not have relevant documents.