India's top three IT companies are understood to have been rejected by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for a project related to the country's biggest biometric count.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys Technologies and Wipro were eliminated from the selection process for the project on technical grounds. Another IT major, HCL Technologies, was also rejected. The size of the project is not yet known. UIDAI is working on an ambitious plan to give a unique identification number to each of India's 100 crore-plus citizens. It is headed by software entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani.
UIDAI instead shortlisted global IT services companies IBM and Accenture, and also Bangalore-based IT services and solutions provider MindTree for the application development services (ADM) segment of the UID project. ADM is the first of the many IT projects of UIDAI that have come up for bidding until now.
A TCS spokesperson said the company does not comment on customer-specific information. Emails sent to Infosys and Wipro remained unanswered.
"The bids were opened today and of the 10 identified companies, the UID team shortlisted only three for this project. The final bidder will be announced soon. Those companies that are out of the race have been rejected on technical grounds," said a person close to the development, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
IT firms bidding for the project had to clear a technical test, which has a cut-off of 70 per cent. Those who would clear this would then be evaluated on a commercial basis.
"The main criterion for the selection has been the quality or the technical services. So whoever gets the highest score in terms of technicality is being shortlisted. Cost or the financial would be the last criterion for finalising the right IT partner. Rather 80 per cent of the evaluation is on issues like delivery, technology platforms as this is high volume work," said the person.
In January, UIDAI had called for bids and floated the Request for Proposal (RFP) for design, development, testing, integration, support and maintenance of its application software. About 19 companies had bid for RFP, of which 10 were shortlisted in March.
UIDAI plans to issue the first set of unique identification numbers between August 2010 and February 2011. Nilekani plans to issue 600 million UIDs over the next five years. UIDAI, which was allocated a sum of Rs 120 crore in 2009 budget, saw its allocation increase 16 times to Rs 1,900 crore for 2010-11.
The high interest of IT firms in the project is due to the immense opportunity it has. Biometrics, which includes fingerprint, face and iris recognition, and computing power hold the keys to the UID project, which is estimated to offer a Rs 15,000-20,000 crore opportunity to computing, database, smartcard and storage vendors besides systems integrators. For every rupee of IT spend on the project, industry experts estimate, around 60 per cent of this would go to hardware vendors.
