The Nandan Nilekani-headed Unique Identification Authority of India has extended the deadline for the bidding process (request for quotation or RFQ) for its first two information technology projects, from February 24 to March 2.
"We have extended the deadline by a few days, as there are a few holidays. The IT firms, too, had asked for an extension. It's just a delay of two-three days," confirmed R S Sharma, director general of UIDAI.
About 30 companies had participated in the pre-bid conference at Bangalore towards the end of January. A source, however, said only two bids had been made so far. While the first one was for project management consultancy, the other was for application development and maintenance services.
"So far, not a single bid has been made by any of the IT firms," the source added. "Close to 700-800 questions were asked during this conference and the UIDAI team had to clarify each one of these," said another source.
IT companies like TCS, Wipro, Mahindra Satyam, HCL Technologies and Infosys Technologies are considered likely bodders, since they already have e-governance projects under their belt.
For instance, TCS is implementing the Rs 1,000-crore ePassport project. Wipro bagged the Employees' State Insurance Corporation project, valued at about Rs 2,200 crore (Rs 22 billion). Infosys bagged the EBiz one, which aims at facilitating interaction between the government and companies through a single portal.
Sources within IT companies, on condition of anonymity, said the "bidding norms have been made very stringent, and since many IT firms objected to the process, the deadline had to be extended".
For instance, no consortiums are being allowed. Besides, only those Indian players will be allowed that have garnered revenue of Rs 200 crore (Rs 2 billion) or above from software application (application development and maintenance) work for the past three consecutive years.
"This is not all. The IT firm should have worked on a large government project. In that case, there are very few firms who would get shortlisted. Even firms who have won the large government outsourcing projects have either missed the deadline period or have yet to move out of the pilot phase. In that case, only firms like TCS, Wipro or an Infosys would qualify for bidding," said the source from a company who attended the meeting.
When asked, a TCS spokesperson declined to comment.
The UID project would provide an identification number to each of the over one billion residents of India. The first set of UIDs will be issued between August 2010 and February 2011.
Nandan Nilekani, former Infosys co-chairman, who now heads the UIDAI, plans to issue 600 million UIDs over the next five years. The project, first of its kind, has several challenges. The first hurdle is collection of data of each individual.
The project will collect data such as iris profiles, biometric prints of 10 fingers, gender, mother and fathers' names and address, among other details.
For this, UIDAI will leverage the existing infrastructure of government and private agencies. Registrars will be state governments or central government agencies such as the petroleum ministry and Life Insurance Corporation. Registrars may also be private sector participants such as banks and insurance companies.
"The process of entering into MoUs with state governments is underway," says Nilekani. He has also enlisted the assistance of close to 30 IT professionals in the task, with the help of software body Nasscom.
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 (Rs 150-200 billion) 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 will go to hardware vendors.
Additional inputs from Bibhu Ranjan Mishra
