JOIN USDelivering a talk on the UID scheme at a programme organised by the district branch of the National Institute of Personnel Management at St Aloysius College, Bhat said that the project of assigning UID to citizens was kicked off when the government set up Unique Identity Authority. Former Director of Infosys Nandan Nilekani has already been appointed as the head of this committee. The committee will focus on making available the Unique ID database, to all ministries that covers passports, ration cards, PAN cards, electoral IDs and many others, who can in turn integrate their databases with it. At first, the UID numbers will be provided to those with voters’ ID and later minors will be incorporated. In the latter case, the ID will be automatically converted to include voters’ ID as the person becomes a major. The major advantage of UID is that citizens need not carry different cards for different purposes.
Almost all identification, license data will be incorporated in the card. It will also weed out bogus cards as the whole data is based on a centralised database. The first set of cards may be distributed by early 2010, Bhat hoped.