JOIN US'Aadhaar enrolment in State will be finished in a year'
Over 50 per cent of Karnataka’s population has been enrolled for Aadhaar card and 37 per cent of them have already received the numbers, said Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Chairman Nandan Nilekani.
Speaking at the launch of UIDAI’s data centre on Thursday, he said the enrolment of the entire population of the State would be completed in a year’s time.
“The priority is people, who are below the poverty line (BPL) and other vulnerable categories. But overall, the entire State will be covered by March 2014,” Nilekani said and added that the State had been in the forefront of the UID programme and the linkage with direct benefit transfer schemes had also been a success in Karnataka.
“A total of Rs 10 lakh has been transferred through it till now,” he said. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah also emphasised that the government’s focus was on the enrolment of the under privileged and marginal sections of society.
“We know there are a lot of bogus ration cards including BPL cards. For now, we will give rice at Re one per kg to all BPL cardholders, but once Aadhaar becomes a reality it will become easier to identify the real beneficiaries,” he said.
Agriculture Minister Krishna Byre Gowda, while pointing out that there was a lot of corruption in the administration across the country, said Aadhaar would go a long way in curbing it.
38 crore received card
UIDAI Deputy Director General Ashok Dalwai said that a total of 47 crore enrolments had been completed across the country, of which, 38 crore people had been given their Aadhaar numbers.
The proposed data centre, he said, would be spread across 6,245 sq mtr with a storage capacity of 6 PB (petabyte), comprising 4,000 servers.
“The data centre architecture takes into account the scale (volume of transactions and records). Open and vendor neutral architecture has been adopted in order to ensure inter-operability, enable us of open source technologies and to allow the ecosystem to build standardised libraries,” he said.
The complex is coming up on 3.14 acre of land leased out by the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and is being constructed at a cost of Rs 118 crore. The remaining land will be used for the construction of the UIDAI Regional Office (19,590 sqm), which will cost Rs 116 crore.
“The bare shell of the data centre building has been handed over to Wipro Infotech for developing the data centre, which is likely to be inaugurated by end of March 2014,” he said.
The data centre will be part of the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR), UIDAI’s logical centre of operations.
Currently, CIDR comprises two data centre locations––Bangalore (3,600 sq ft) and Greater Noida (2,99 sq ft). The Bangalore centre serves as the primary centre for the generation of Aadhaar, while the Noida centre serves as the primary centre for authentication.
“Given the magnitude of the project it was thought important to have a larger facility in Bangalore, which is now being constructed. The new facility will replace the existing one, which operates from a rented building,” another official from the Authority said.