The ambitious project to provide every citizen with a unique ID card would receive an initial funding of Rs 100 crore. The project would address security concerns and top IT firms like Infosys, Wipro, and TCS would get orders worth crores. It would be a giant leap in e-governance.

It appears that both Yahoo and Microsoft are ducking it out to help power the technology for India’s Unique Identification project.

Earlier this year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates expressed a strong interest in participating in the project, meeting Nilekani and assuring him that Microsoft would be able to assign the IDs swiftly.

Internet giant Yahoo today offered to be part of India’s plan. This week Yahoo’s worldwide Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz today met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and expressed interest to partner the government in the project to use Yahoo for the project, but Bartz says that there’s no commercial interest in the deal and Yahoo would help power the project on a non-profit basis.

It’s unclear if Microsoft has the same “non-profit” stance as Yahoo, but obviously both companies want a piece of a highly ambitious project that could be implemented in other emerging countries. And it looks like IBM is also throwing its hat into the ring as well, so it should be interesting to see which tech giant wins out.

The Challenges involved in making this Project successful:

There are a lot of logistics challenges involved in implementing the project:

• Issuing numbers or cards is no big deal. But making relevant institutes and departments in States ready for the Unique Identification regime is the real issue.
• The ability to share and access information, make the processes robust enough and ensure the sustainability were the key challenges.

 
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