

Identifying a billion Indians - bjelkeman-again
http://www.economist.com/node/18010459?story_id=18010459

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bjelkeman-again
The Indian UID project is very interesting to me, as the work they are doing
is done on an enormous scale. There are other systems which reach this scale,
and arguably are more complex than this (Facebook for example), but it is
still impressive.

"By 2014, the government wants half of India’s population to be allotted UID
numbers. To do that, the Authority will photograph a staggering 600 million
Indians, scan 1.2 billion irises, collect six billion fingerprints and record
600 million addresses."

Read more: [http://business.in.com/article/big-bet/uidai-inside-the-
worl...](http://business.in.com/article/big-bet/uidai-inside-the-worlds-
largest-data-management-project/19632/1#ixzz1CHJO0uxj)

A friend of mine, Srikanth Nadhamuni, leads the technical development from the
Indian government side and it is really rather interesting to talk about the
implications for this system with him.

One aspect which doesn't get much coverage is that they are going to use the
UID system to facilitate very inexpensive money transfers for people. This is
in a country where a lot of people, maybe even most of them (hundreds of
millions of people) don't actually have a bank account at all today.

Another aspect which is interesting is that the team started the development
in a way which would be very familiar to many HN readers. They worked out of
an apartment in Bangalore, where several team members lived as well as worked,
in a true startup atmosphere. Software companies, like MS and Goggle would
show up with teams and end up sitting around the kitchen table or on the spare
bench from the hallway to participate in sessions where the project was being
discussed.

They have software volunteers, expat-Indians, coming in from all over the
world to work on the project, the top level people behave just like any other
software startup entrepreneur you would expect, sitting up to 4am in the
morning doing code reviews, walking into a room and asking: How's it going?
Not the usual bureaucratic India you would expect.

If I wasn't working on what I work on right now I would probably have been a
volunteer on the project myself, if they would have had me that is. :)

