India has a population of 1.2 billion people. Thats a lot! But that did not stop the Indian Government from letting Accenture, a US based IT firm, win a contract by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to provide a unique identification number to all of its people. The program called Aadhaar ID program requires Accenture to provide multi modal biometric identification technology.
Accenture in a statement today said, “Aadhaar will not only be designed to enable the Government to deliver important social welfare programs like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREGA) to rural India, but also provide easier access for residents to services and resources such as health, education and welfare programs.”
It will be interesting to see how Accenture will go ahead with the system. India has 1.2 billion people and Accenture claims that it will work to get the unique identification numbers to every Indian and to the remotest residents in India. We had reported earlier that India has about 584 million cell phone subscribers and growing every month. Thats half the population which is almost twice as much as the US. Accenture could easily track someone with their cell phone number.
my lucky number