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Rediff.com  » Business » TCS, Wipro, TechM, IBM, NEC shortlisted for UID project

TCS, Wipro, TechM, IBM, NEC shortlisted for UID project

By Shivani Shinde
May 28, 2010 09:29 IST
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Domestic information technology services majors Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro Technologies and Tech Mahindra and global players like IBM and Japan-based NEC are among the 10 shortlisted companies for the Nandan Nilekani-headed Unique Identification Authority of India biometrics job.

"This is the second stage of shortlisting. These firms are now qualified for a request for proposal. In the next five-six weeks, the final bidder will be announced," said a source close to the development. The size of the contract could not be confirmed.

Meanwhile, the UIDAI has also started issuing RFPs for the data centre management work of the project. Bidders will be shortlisted over the next four-six weeks.

Biometrics will be the second IT contract from UIDAI. The first was for application development services, worth Rs 190 million (Rs 19 crore), bagged by Bangalore-based IT services provider MindTree. The first UID contract to become a consulting partner for UIDAI, of the size of Rs 70.5 million (Rs 7.05 crore), was bagged by Consultancy firm Ernst & Young.

Biometrics (which includes fingerprint, facial and iris scans) and computing power hold the keys to Nilekani's UID project, which is estimated to offer a Rs 150-200 billion (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 UID project, industry experts estimate around 60 per cent of the spending will go to hardware vendors.

According to biometrics tender details, the bidder shall have at least 2,500 agents employed in delivering in-bound contact centre services and have at least 500 physical in-bound contact centre seats operational at a single location in India as on March 31. The firms shall have demonstrated capability of serving customers in Hindi, English, and at least one of the required languages in each of the regions mentioned herewith - South (Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam), West (Gujarati, Marathi), East (Bengali, Oriya, Assamese).

The bidder shall also have proven experience in implementing and ongoing management of large in-bound contact centre solutions. The bidder shall have handled at least 5 million in-bound calls a month for every month in FY '09 –10 or an equivalent average.

The first set of UIDs will be issued between August 2010 and February 2011. Nilekani plans to issue 600 million UIDs over the next five years.

Nilekani had earlier told this newspaper that no single IT contract is likely to cross Rs 300 million (Rs 30 crore). "It is true UIDAI is looking for best-of-the-breed service providers. In principle, we desire to build a system to prevent vendor lock-in and this is likely to bring down the cost of procurement for IT systems and software," said Nilekani.

(Additional reporting by Bibhu Ranjan Mishra from Bangalore)

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Shivani Shinde
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