The department of telecom will meet UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani on Sept 24 to discuss how the database of nearly 500 million telephone subscribers can be used for issuing the unique identification number.
Additional Secretary in DoT Subodh Kumar will chair the meeting, which will also focus on the enrollment process of UID and how the telecom companies could help in the task of "Standardisation of Know Your Resident' norms which is a major goal of the all-India project for issuing the unique ID.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has been established to provide a unique number to every resident in the country to target social security services as well as to assure the internal security. DoT, along with the various telecom service providers, is a major stakeholder in this process.
There are 480 million telephone subscribers in the country at the moment. Taking margin of error into account, the telecom database is an authenticated database of people in terms of identity and address is concerned.
Authenticating 1.16 billion people is a Herculean task. The telecom user database at least can help the UIDAI to have some part of the personal information checked.
Nilekani, who had headed IT major Infosys in the past, has already said UIDAI would be looking for the databases of PAN card, passport, driving license, ration card, voter I-card and so on. But the first three cover only a small part of the population and the ration card data is subsumed in voter card data.
