i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Proving identity in India can sometime result in frustrating experience. If you go to Bank for opening an account, they will ask for Permanent Account Number (PAN) card issued by finance ministry of India. If you hail from low income group and want to take advantage of subsidized food provided by the government then they will ask for ration card. If you want to exercise your right as a citizen of India during various elections then they will ask for voter ID card. Furthermore, all these proof documents are not linked with each other.

But there seems to be some good news for all of you who have faced the identity crisis in India before. Government of India has announced the ambitious Unique Identity Card (UID) project which promises to be panacea for all the problems related to multiple proof documents. This project is aimed towards creating a unique national ID for every Indian citizen with the objective of managing citizen identity, increasing national security and facilitating e-governance. But there are numerous challenges for this project. First of all creating a database for 1.2 billion people is one helluva of a task. Then there are issues of linking currently existing identity documents like Voter ID with UID. This project is classic example of information organization/information retrieval problem.

Further Reading:

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4716195.cms

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipurpose_National_Identity_Card

Author: Dhawal