Identifying a billion Indians

http://www.economist.com/node/18010459?story_id=18010459

3 1 15 years ago

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."

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. :)

Identifying a billion Indians

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