A 'Unique' challenge

This piece in business standard illustrates the size of the challenge faced by the Unique Identification Authority of India(UIDAI). Any system that can hand out an average of 1.5 million biometric cards every month is mighty impressive. In this case, that rate of performance is barely enough to keep up with the growth in population.The goal is to generate one million identification numbers a day:

Even a cursory look at the UIDAI website for the month-wise enrolments of Aadhaar numbers shows the enormity of the task.
In February, the UIDAI generated 1.11 million Aadhaar numbers. In March, the generation of numbers saw an increase of 37.5 per cent to 1.78 million, only to fall again to 1.32 million in April. In May, it showed an increase of 64 per cent to reach an all-time high of 2.16 million. At present, in the month of June, 1.5 million Aadhaar enrollments have taken place. The sudden rise in May is attributed to vacations in schools and colleges.
R S Sharma, director general of the UIDAI, says he sees no reason to doubt the authority’s ability to generate a million numbers every day by October. Others in his department doubt his optimism.

They have roped in some of the top talent to work on this.Smart thinking has gone into awarding contracts:

When an individual is enrolled, his biometric data must be compared with everyone else’s to ensure there is no duplication. Sometimes the workers who show people how to place their fingers on the scanner accidentally scan their own fingerprints. As enrolments hit a peak of about 1m a day, the system will need to carry out a staggering 14 billion matches per second.

This mighty task has been awarded to private contractors in an unusual way. There are three vendors: Accenture and L-1 Identity Solutions of America, plus Morpho of France. The firm that does the fastest, most accurate job gets 50% of the work; the others get 30% or 20%. This allocation is frequently reassessed, so if the second-best firm starts doing better, it picks up some work from the leading firm. This keeps everyone sharp.

    Most large projects suffer from cost overruns and delays. It is hard to imagine UIDAI being immune to such problems. At a time when responsible democracies rarely build large monuments to showcase their countries , this project comes close to being a national monument albeit an effort to do some public good.

Will it be a worthy initiative? All of us will have to wait to find out.