Unique ID‏

5-Apr-2010
Dear PM,

It is good that government is serious about providing unique id card to every Indian. We should take this opportunity to gather vital socio economic and demographic details as well like

• family information including ids of children, spouse, parents, grand parents and first cousin brothers/sisters to create one level deep network.
• qualification
• reading/writing capability
• mother tongue
• language spoken, understood, read and written
• assets - land, home, TV, fridge, Car, bike etc.
• Profession/skill
• average monthly income
• number of days without job
• how many meals taken in a day
• base food taken - rice or wheat
• parents living with their children
• known diseases
• living in slum
• house vulnerable to storm and flood
• house area per person
• sources of income
• number of earning members
• Child labour

It is very important that government publishes potential users of national id and ask respective ministries be ready for it. Architecture of the project must be scalable enough to add more and more users in future. Obvious users should be

• Income tax dept
• Banks
• mobile companies
• Police
• immigration
• election commission
• public places like shopping mall, cinema hall, tourist spots
• each and every registered company in India

 In essence system must be capable of dealing with billions of records in real time

I think this project needs to be completed asap ideally between 18-24 months. Responsibility of basic data collection can be given to companies like TCS, Wipro, HCL, Infosys, NIIT etc. Each company may cover 10 Lok Shaba constituencies or the entire state. We can deploy half million college pass out under supervision of 50,000 professionals like teachers, executives, celebrities, IT professionals etc to capture data in 12-18 months. Entire interview should be video recorded for data verification.