Bharat Rakshak

Even if they share space with other government offices, they will need staff trained on UID procedures and equipment. I imagine that salaries for these people will come out of UID budget. Because of the privacy and security concerns in this operation, I'd be surprised if this function is outsourced to the private sector. Point taken on the security protocols, but like I said earlier the technical implemenation is not what will suck up the money.

The point is 1 million USD in Silicon Valley == a storage company bootstrapped who eats their own dog food to run a backup service for consumer PCs with diskspace in use running into 100s of petabytes. In your world 1 million USD == one storage system which provides a mere 20TB of storage. Ofcourse thats the difference in cost you get when you put bureaucrats (govt/corporate) instead of engineers to solve a problem.

[rest of non-value-add stuff]
You are merely resorting to ad hominem


Amen brother.

Unfortunately that is exactly how the government would do it. Better would be to borrow existing manpower which does verification for cell phones, landlines, bank accounts and other KYC compliant services and integrate them into UID project. One more identity issued by government means one more queue for the common man.

I'll ignore the ad hominem attacks but for the sake of completeness I'll try and answer your posts for the benefit of lurkers.

I never said use tethered blackberry(s) for Internet access over GPRS. PGP encryption can be used with any kind of device which even GOI itself can't crack with its massive resources as the blackberry fiasco shows.

The BSNL/MTNL may not have 100% uptime but last I heard they can still provide un-limited Internet over a DSL line to the places you mentioned above.

Very typical of people who assume there is one right way of doing things which needs to be forced on everyone with money stolen from un-suspecting tax-payers. The way to fix existing system is not technology but enforcement. Find out and remove the rotten apples from the system who were responsible at whatever level for issuance of duplicate PAN cards instead of creating yet another possibly crackable system.
[/sarcasm]

I'd imagine that such outsourcing is undesirable in the enrollment phase due to the risk of identity theft in case crooks get hold of the fingerprints, iris scans and name+address data.

^^^ that will happen one way or another. its a guarantee.

So providing backup for consumer PC and providing storage arrays is same? Backup is completely different and storage array is completely different, research your facts. The system that provides 20 TB comes with support and commitment that as long a the user follows the recommended procedures of installation, no data will be lost. Do you see the mentioned company giving the same kind of commitment? If they give, can they prove it? If they want to prove it, prove it with what? Research a bit and you will get your answer. If you want to know, its easy ask me and I can do that free of cost i.e. the architecture of Storage Arrays and their significance and the basic difference with SAN and NAS.



Said by a guy who is unable to answer questions asked, has no solution and talking completely in fantasy.




Amen indeed, becoz people with wrong facts are worse than the above.

Thats exactly I think about you, people who think they know everything and rest everyone are jokers. But if you look what they have to offer, you will find nothing. Every system in this world is crackable. The only way forward is that system survives which is the toughest to crack.

If you think the existing system has to be fixed, why don't you share your views about how can GOI go about fixing the system. Lets say if you are given the task to improve PAN service. What you will do? I would really like to hear that and thats no sarcasm.

There are no attacks here, attitude is being matched to attitude. Thats all about it. Try visiting Ongole in AP. I had been to a village in Ongole, where the whole village has a single well and only 2 or 3 families have electricity. Do you think BSNL has a digital exchange in that place that can support broadband? BTW the whole village had just one telephone in Post Office, which is like 10-20 km away. I am sure we would be having thousands if not lakhs of such villages. Lets get a bit realistic here, shall we?

I was not at all referring to tethered blackberry. When I say reliable is the quality of network. You don't want tail drops while sending the fingerprints and/or iris scan, right?

When it comes to security light weight protocols like SSH is enough and works with http based suit quiet easily. That should be enough and though IANS it has the least b/w consumption compared to all security protocols out there.

The central point is:- It is possible to build storage arrays ( as in != rocket science ) vastly cheaper if you stop drinking vendor kool-aid. The system can be designed for whatever characteristics are more useful. Those guys don't need to prove anything to you they have paying customers and whole lot of other startups requesting them to start an enterprise storage business.

See another example http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/146861
Ofcourse someone who believes in DDM like mainstream media belonging to the west more than the dime a dozen blogs isn't going to learn.

Yes I would like to hear the difference between your 1 million USD storage box purchased from a vendor and building stuff on your own.

Is 1m USD equipment capable of delivering more random Input Output Operations Per Second from practically same number of spindles( read disks ).

Does a storage array used in SAN/NAS have more Mean Time between Failure when organized in similar setup to RAID-10+spare disks as opposed to having the same setup configured in Linux on your own.

Do BBUs, Multi-pathing on fiber running on storage networking ( as opposed to say ISCSI on 10Gbit Ethernet with NIC bonding that can easily deliver 40Gbps at several orders lower cost ), storage volume replication, exporting of LUNs in hardware make the million USD storage arrays better than removing all these Single points of failure on your own?
All I hear is regurgitated marketing talk from storage vendors paraded as universal truth as if written in a holy book.

The conversation with you really has a surreal quality :-

Me: Dude, here look here's how to build with schematics with part numbers and costs, an 8K USD device that has twice the amount of storage of a million USD device.

You: Duh! such blogs are dime a dozen

Me: Look again its a blog belonging to a storage vendor who stores data for large number of consumers backing up their PCs with utmost reliability, they used practically less than a million USD to build a business storing petabytes of data.

You: Yeah but can they prove they are really more reliable than my million USD storage 'array', you didn't research what is the difference between consumer grade stuff and 'enterprise' stuff

Me: Duh! what 'enterprise features' they can all be had in similar costs another here see another blog link
.....
Rinse and repeat.
So having spent a million USD on a 20TB storage obsolete by the time it got shipped to your datacenter/NOC you can spend the rest of your life arguing about how it is better. Go on suit yourself.

So instead of the first 3 towns you needed for your example now you have a 4th town, we need to move farther and farther until we can find populations un-touched by communication revolution, reliability shall improve when there are angry customers shouting at BSNL staff.

Though it appears to me that leased circuits can be ordered at Ongole Telephone exchange.
http://www.ap.bsnl.co.in/pkm/pkmcscsubviewyes.asp

This is like what 2% of the population in the country where broadband is 10 km away, VSATs can be used there. The rollout costs don't become 10x maybe 2x here. I didn't talk about rollout costs anywhere Vera_K mentioned a few valid points about those. Glad you think http over ssh works and you don't need to setup MPLS VPN links as have been setup with most CSCs ( Common Service Centers )

Most problems in systems arise because of high latency and high turnaround time to get simple things done, creating in-efficiencies. If it is too hard to obtain a PAN/UID/Voter ID/Passport that is most likely it would be skipped. For e.g. lot of folks who have PAN cards/Passports do not have Voter ID cards ( the original massive failure a precursor to UID )

1. Make it super easy change addresses associated with an existing PAN cards, Driving Licenses, Voter ID cards, Digital Signatures, Passports. This is really the most important step. Otherwise the system below would generate too many false positives. The concern is identity not address.

2. Base PAN card application approval on actual physical verification instead of possibly fake address/identity proofs or an Identity that already has an actual physical verification process done and is verifiable online over Internet as belonging to the person who applied for a PAN e.g. Driver's License, Voter ID card, Class II Digital Certificate.

3. Audit agencies that do physical verification for PAN/(any other ID), determine where most of the fraud is coming from and fix it by putting in fear of GOI into those who are lax. Enable these agencies with online access to data they are verifying instead of the currently disjointed non-traceable reports.

3a. Make the physical verification systematic, painless, timebound and finite cost operation.

4. Provide easier API based verification to users of PAN data , i.e. anyone who needs to verify PAN numbers for TDS deposits and to meet KYC requirements.
4a. Generally make it impossible to submit fake identity to fraudulently obtain a new bank account and or credit of any sort while making it super easy to obtain a valid identity and access to modern financial/telecom systems.
4b. Right now its the opposite, 'Jugaad' has it easier to just sidestep the system to get anything useful done.

5. Users of PAN data should provide address back while verifying PAN, this data can then be used to de-duplicate based on algorithms which can determine equality/proximity of addresses. Run skip-tracing algorithms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiptrace (also used by financial institutions ) to deduplicate, locate delinquents and punish a few of them. Punish those who obtained duplicate/fraudulent PANs and actually using more than one, once the system becomes efficient at search, locate and arrest it becomes harder and harder to bribe verification agencies to obtain a PAN fraudulently.

6. Addresses wherever collected can be validated against Property registration databases to ensure their existence and validity, at the least mark possibly invalid addresses associated with PAN cards for further investigation.

7. Reduce and simplify taxation for the common man, the common man wants to remain out of the system because it places onerous liabilities of filing returns (which by the way is no longer Saral for most folks who are not salaried ), the economic incentives of staying out of the system are very high, it needs to be reversed.

Unfortunately doing the above is not currently the aim of UID, it is yet another system with extremely curtailed functionality and massive costs associated with it.

Let me recap my position on the UID project:-
1. It could be useful but so would be fixing existing systems at a much lower cost.
2. If it has to be done, focus on lowering the cost without compromising on usefulness of the systems, it is possible by involving engineers into the system design which hasn't happened yet despite noises about involving Open Source Community.
3. Building a massive monolithic system un-connected to anything else with limited aims from the scratch is going to be a massive waste of time for everyone who'll need to interact with the system. The concerns about abuse of the system or its security haven't been addressed appropriately yet, there seems to be a broad agreement that no system is future proof and not prone to being cracked.
4. The capabilities being attributed to UID system are not being promised by the version 1 of the system, there is no roadmap for it either.
5. Not convinced about the costs vs benefits of the system. Cost estimates for various portions of the project, various designs, schematics haven't been made publicly available and open to scrutiny so their security can be verified. Security through obscurity has long been dead that seems to be current practice.

Its definitely not rocket science but it is definitely proprietary as they invested huge sums on RnD to get that product to work the way it does. Lets for the time being think of your solution. None of the one that you have specified provides block level access to storage and only provides file level access. So the OS is never gonna see it as a raw storage space, but it will see it only as a mapped folder. I have yet to see in any of your solution that has come via cheap way to provide direct access to storage blocks. Cheap is good but that doesn't mean cheap always satisfies the requirements. And if you look at any solution with block level access to storage will never come cheap. If we go by your solution, then everyday someone has to initiate the transfer of files to the storage using NFS or SFS. The OS can never access remote storage on block level and can only see them as a folder share.



Already explained earlier but let me get a bit deeper. The solutions that you have put forth works good for data backup but it cannot be used for direct data I/O from the Database/application itself. Because, in the mentioned solutions, the storage is available on file level and not on block level. There is a file system layer that is active on all individual boxes that have the hard drives. The way they communicate with each other seems to be on the application layer in the first solution that you said i.e. backblaze

The second solution i.e:

http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/146861

provides the tool openfiler which is much more extensive but still provides only file level access with software Raid levels upto Raid 10. Software Raids have their own disadvantages compared to hardware RAIDs with the later being costlier. Even in this solution the access that it provides is still on file level and not block level.

Why do you need block level access to begin with. Let me tell you a case study:

1.) You have 5 webservers, 1 Mail server and 2 Database servers.
2.) Each server has a min. on board hdd with raid 1 providing a storage size of 300 GB.
3.) You have one storage array of 10 Terabytes (10 + 10) (1 TB each) with RAID 10 from the vendors that I specified.

The webservers do not need much storage space and hence use their local hard drives.

The mail servers need more than the local 300 GB. So you install the operating system on the local hard drive. Then using SAN technologies and communication protocols like iSCSI, FC etc. use connect to the storage area, whose RAW disk space is already mapped using LUNs. Those LUNs show up in your server as direct hard drive partition. The operating system formats that virtual hard drive using its own file system and treats it as a local drive, with the Mailing application direction doing block level I/O on it, though its residing on a Storage Array. It is made possible because of the custom ASICs which natively support FC or iSCSI and provide block level access to every LUN.

*The data on spindle arrangement is decided directly using the onboard CLI of the storage array and LUNs are created depending on the requirement with whatever RAID level required and completely transparent to the initiator. In this case the initiator is the Mail Server and the target is the storage array.

Similarly for database servers, you can create much more bigger LUN and attach it directly to the server as a new partition. The entire storage array comes with its own set of RAID controllers and completely transparent to the server or the OS.



Talking in terms of File I/O. All the cheap systems you specified, they just do I/O. None of them does caching and predictive data regeneration. The enterprise class sytems comes with its own caching engine which stores the most frequently accessed files in its cache engine. Apart from that, when the same pattern of strings are noticed, the predictive engine regenerates the data even without accessing the file. That kind of caching far surpasses any amount of I/O that the present disk operators support. Moreover both the examples that you gave are examples of NAS and definitely not SAN. I would had agreed with you if the requirement is for NAS, but then the requirement I see is primarily for SAN with NAS providing secondary storage just for backup. I would definitely think of using the solutions mentioned by you for NAS but not as the primary storage.

So the server CPU cycles are completely dedicated to application and need not be wasted at all on file I/O. The File I/O is taken care by the local iSCSI or FCOE or FC controller without putting any burden on server CPU.



In the above said example there won't be single point failure because the storage array is never a single stand alone box. It is min. 2, with both acting as complete redundant to each other. Most of the times even the servers are two to make the system completely redundant.

BTW, I am not the types who goes by the vendor talks. In Fact all my vendors think I am the toughest nut to crack. All solutions are good, your cheaper ones and my costly ones, depends what we actually need.



I am not surreal at all. You couldn't answer most of the questions I put forth but you are easy when it comes to put blame on me. Infact you are the guy who has a very stringent mind and probably an illussion that you know the best so wake up. If you think you know the best, then you can prove it to me by answering my questions and convincing me. Trust me, I am not the egoistic types, I will be first person to praise you, if you can convince me and yes I will praise it in open and even accept that my thinking was flawed.

Well I would say I agree with most of the part with the exception of:

"Unfortunately doing the above is not currently the aim of UID, it is yet another system with extremely curtailed functionality and massive costs associated with it"

Coz, what you have put forth for PAN that is going to be a part of UID, and UID has much more bigger things to accomplish.

-The PAN assures only for the Income Tax eligible individuals, it won't cover minors who are not eligible to file tax returns.

-Even to confirm the identity it has to be biometric. All cases you put forth will only help in short term, but in long term, it has to be something with biometric. The main reason is most of the people are not digitally enlightened. You can't expect them to use smart cards with digital certificates. Bio-metric becomes easy in such case and is an absolute way of identification though crackable. But then again, Biometric is tougher to crack than digital cards.

The costs vs benefits is not convincing yet because the true benefits have not been disclosed yet. There are lot of things doing rounds in murmurs and there are some executive and bureaucratic hurdles to be streamlined before they can make it public. The way the whole system is being done, it seems there is a deep sense to make the actions speak louder than the words. The entire security infrastructure would be made public, once everything is fine tuned and throughly discussed. They don't wish to come out with half cooked eggs.

I went for the 4th town because you changed the topic with DSL broadband when I was referring to cellular 3G.



Thats the Ongole district headquarters and not in the villages 20 km away. Leased Circuits, Broad band etc. are not feasible in that exchange.



I have yet to see that and I certainly don't believe that only 2% of population in the country is away from broadband. That is not the ground reality. I was never worried about the roll out costs to begin with because my equation completely revolved around using 3G cellular network and Nandan Nilekani is on paper saying that is what they are going to use, as it is the cheapest and the most reliable. But I guess, we need to wait for the Service Providers to roll out 3G. MPLs VPNs, will never help in cellular communications. MPLS VPNs do not offer any kind of security. You need to use any other encryption technology over MPLS VPN to make it completely secured, like SSL, IPSEC, TLS etc. They call it MPLS VPN just for the heck of it, the more appropriate word is MPLS Tunnel.

>>>The way to fix existing system is not technology but enforcement. Find out and remove the rotten apples from the system who were responsible at whatever level for issuance of duplicate PAN cards instead of creating yet another possibly crackable system.

That is something physically impossible to do..Moreover, there is no overwhelming need for the common man to obtain a PAN Card.

The problem with the existing system is that nothing can be 'verified' for sure..In a PAN card, if you are verifying the address, I can produce a perfectly verifiable address, get the card. I can also apply for a duplicate card with another address, which is also verifiable by any authority (or bribe those authority to complete the verification process). It is not reliable at all.

From what I could understand, in the UID system, a persons biometrics is recorded, and a number is attached to that record and handed over to the person. This may be stored in different set of clusters..e.g., numbers starting with similar digits in first few places in one cluster, next in another cluster etc..(this way the checking time can be reduced). If a person who's biometrics is already recorded, tries to get a duplicate card, then the system can verify it from its record of biometric data stored. (at the time of issue of the number first time, it may have to go through the complete data stored).

Once the number is issued, different authorities like banking, IT, passport, air travel, PDS, land registration and a host of other services (in fact any one with a facility to verify the bio metric data) can demand the UID number to identify the person.

After linking any activity, law enforcing / IT /Revenue authorities may be able to check the activities of a particular person by just typing his UID and get the data.

For eg., if a person has multiple accounts in different banks at different location. The RBI/IT dept may be able to link all these accounts of the person and get a view of his total financial transactions. In fact this is already being done by the IT dept in the case of TDS - all the TDS deductions in a particular PAN number is centrally available at the IT dept's Delhi office - and they send queries to the individuals from Delhi to all over the country. The system cannot succeed fully, because those with many PAN numbers can escape this loop. This will not be possible with a UID number because it cannot be duplicated.

Same with other services / cards.
JMT

It is possible to export raw LUNs
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aoetools/


[SNIP] all arguments eulogizing access to raw LUNs as if it was Amrit obtained after the Sagar Manthan.


RAM's cheap and enabling in-memory writeback cache improves write performance for any machine with or without SAN nothing holy about caching in a SAN box's RAM ( its exactly the same memory used in your server ) and regarding any modern OS takes care of all the good stuff like predictive readahead automatically. Regarding esoteric capabilities mentioned they are seldom useful in real world data access scenarios, at best you are looking at a lot of cache misses.

Tools and Tools and more Tools. I don't see anything that says a end-to-end solution which is capable of doing that. Go check that page again, AE tools is just a list of programs that help to program tools based AoE protocol and its not a tool by itself. I would say more or less an API. I can see you are just trying to prove your point by hook or by crook. For a moment I started thinking that you might have already deployed or tried some technology as you speak with such confidence. I am sure now that you have tried none of the technologies that you put forth and just posting links to support your side of the argument. Neither tried nor tested. Apart backblaze, even which has a lot of unanswered questions about synchronization and state-fullness and confirmed file level access. BTW you have not yet provided anything which talks about something better than LUNs and one of your own posts talked about LUNs. This discussion is going no where and I don't see anything logical coming out of your posts except for blind argument, that what you think is right.



Please ........... Do you mean the way OS does caching of files using RAM is same as a storage array doing the caching? I resign from all arguments that I had with you and I have officially given up on you. I can't beat stupidity !!!

About time.

A quick google search would have clarified a lot of questions of what Open Source today is capable of doing, I am not your vendor to spoon feed you data here.

You have made multiple obsolete observations based on drivel fed to you, each time I gave you some pointers negating them.

If you don't know how to combine together a few tools usefully in Linux+Ethernet environment then go compare the pricing of a readymade solution like http://www.coraid.com/ with your 'reliable' vendors.

Agreed, I should have realized that I can't win argument where there is no logic and the opponent is pursuing a self goal of "My Nose is bigger than you"



Right, and I have been doing that for ages. Your type open source are only good at talking and pointing random links. I don't want an open source vendor or consultant like you. There are far more better and practical open source guys I know, who don't live in myths. First think of spoon feeding yourself. I am not worried about anyone spoon feeding me, never needed that my whole life. I was expecting that you might point out to Open Solaris or FCOE which is much more matured than AOE and has support from Open Source Community or maybe the ZFS. All you came up and which might be practical is OpenFiler, but then again its only practical for NAS and provides only File level access.



The pointers you gave have not negated anything and they don't serve any purpose except your self-purpose of who is mr. smart. Everybody has the right of being delusional. Not a single question answered, all your solution talks about patchwork to some personal blogs which don't even serve the purpose.



Right, you seem to have lot of free time at hand and you are free to combine all the worldly tools out there. Hope the end product works, which I seriously doubt. Biggest joke is Coraid confirms everything that I posted. You seem to be the guy who has a personal war with everything proprietary out there. People who speak loud should have something to back it up. But then they always have the cover of open source and cheap to run and hide.

When I started my career, people talked a lot about how Free BSD is going to change the world, and it is still in the process of changing. They also talked about how Linux is the next big thing and it became the next big thing but not as open source as individual vendors like Red Hat and SUSE (now Novel) took the lead and added a lot of proprietary content. Then people spoke of open architecture processors which is yet to find any takers. After all these years, its become clear that Open which is practical is not that Open. Thats definitely what is going to be with SAN. Open Source and Open architecture will only derive the fundamental or bare minimum technical architecture whereas the practical avatar of it will always be proprietary. Open Source can only define how FCOE or FS will work, but it can never define how the hardware will interact and what makes the solution more efficient is how the hardware interacts with the technology architecture which will always be proprietary. Till then people can talk, as they have been talking for ages.

- Ask backblaze to make it open how their software makes the storage statefull. Will they do that. No, but they claim it as open source. (My understanding is it is done at application layer, I might be wrong, as they are not disclosing that information. They are just talking about how to get the hardware costs down. Their solution is purely useful for their line of business, that is online backup storage. Is that we want?)

- Can openfiler be made to provide block level access. No, because they don't control how controller does IO

- Can Windows or Linux do caching like a Storage array does. No, but they still do caching of the most recent file. Can they do the caching of entire primary index? No, because the OS fundamentally was not designed to do that.

- Can a custom OS built on a GPP (General Purpose Processor) give you the exact performance of custom ASIC specifically meant to do I/O for iSCSI or FCOE? No, because the general processor does a lot more than looking at a specific I/O.

The best thing that even came close to was the Aperi project and died an unknown death. No reason why.

I'll leave it at that.

India's Elephantine Effort

Marina Krakovsky

Communications of the ACM

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/1/103197-indias-elephantine-effort/fulltext

Somewhere I read that Athar ID will be used as the "Provident Fund" account number as well.

If they convert this into a SSN type thing, they should go for a treaty with USA. This will help million+ IT workers who worked in the USA at some point. At $3-4K per year, they can save upto $18-25K in their 6 years of H1B work.

^ The SSN double-tax avoidance treaty is already in place. PPF is all they need as reference. Adhar will only facilitate easy access to PPF accounts. Implementation of the treaty would be a good step forward.

Here is the article from TOI: Unique ID set to replace PF account number - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/busi ... 214002.cms

^ Martenullah

Are you sure about the treaty? Can you pls give me some reference?

I have many R2I friends and I think this will help them.

Ramay,

Yes there is SSN treaty between unkil & GOI......

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... 277802.cms

Aadhaar crosses a milestone...

UID project overambitious, say experts.

It takes no more than candle wax and a tube of fevicol to deceive the unique identification project claimed JT D’souza, a Mumbai-based forensic expert, at a conference on ‘The implications of the UID project in India’ on Saturday. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), headed by Nandan Nilekani, is a mammoth project to provide Indian residents with a unique 12-digit identification number that will serve social welfare purposes. The enrollment process, which started in September 2010, is based on a mechanism that registers individual fingerprints and iris patterns of each and every resident of the country.

“Millions of Indians working in the agricultural sphere, on construction sites and other manual labour have worn-out fingers, resulting in what is technically referred to as low-quality fingerprints,” said D’souza, adding that there is a high probability of excluding them from the proposed benefits.

“The technical glitches in the system form just one part of this overambitious project,” said Usha Ramanathan, who has been closely tracking and debating the UID project. “It is a clear cut violation of privacy whereby all agencies associated with the UIDIA will have access to personal database.”

“We should not misunderstand UID numbering with an entitlement-based identity card,” said Dr Ramakumar, associate professor, Centre for Development Studies, TISS. “The project refers to Indians as ‘customers’ and there is no fixed budget that has been determined for the entire procedure.”

At an enrollment site in Delhi volunteers at the registration desk were a clueless lot, claimed Ramanathan. “The homeless were given addresses of NGOs that had allegedly adopted them, and the ages of most people were renegotiated,” she said.

^^^ Did he forget about IRIS scan? Or is he planning to put candle wax and Fevicol in eyes to deceive?

Because the illiterate hapless are clueless about the benefits UID, so UID is not good WOW what a conclusion.




She seems too upset for homeless. I wonder what would be her alternate recommendation if the above is not done. the homeless dont really have any home and dont really know their age and entering the NGO address and estimated age is totally acceptable. Also whats the big deal in entering NGO address. I am sure there is a mechanism to update address as needed. Homeless are not the only indians whose addresses will change over the period of their lifetime.
Age estimation has been done for decades for passport, ration card, licenses, birth certificates etc so why the shor now?? More surprising is the DDM who comfortably calls them 'experts' and types out their BS without putting an ounce of brain

The khulji of NGOs is that they can be audited. Often times the numbers are padded to gain additional funds/resources.

Karnataka extends UID to all the districts



Vidyashankar is a good man.

Gujarat launches its own UID project.

Gujarat government has launched a separate unique identity (UID) project for every individual residing in the state, finding that the Government of India`s UID project under top I-T honcho Nandan Nilekani is still largely on paper.

Under this project, every individual living in Gujarat will have a separate UID number, which will feature several details-whether the person is below poverty line (BPL) or above poverty line (APL), and whether he pays income tax, permanent address, property ownership, including land, houses and vehicles owned, and whether he is entitled to reservation benefit.

Two government departments - state civil supplies and revenue - are working overtime to make the state`s own UID project a big success. While the civil supplies department is already in the process of completing a database required for getting essential commodities from the ration shop, the revenue department will add rest of the details related to income and property. "A pilot project has already been implemented in Moria village of Banakantha district", said state civil supplies secretary Raj Kumar, adding, "Now, we plan to implement it in one village in every taluka." Thereafter, the project will move to the urban areas.

To cost Rs 15 crore to the state coffers, a major feature of the state`s UID is that it will be activated only when the biometric impression is put to the attached computer. "All information will be contained in a simple bar code, which will be read by a hand-held scanner on a designated computer on getting the biometric detail," Kumar said, adding, "We have begun by sticking the bar code on ration cards. The e-gram centres in 13,000 villages will take biometric impressions to read the barcoded information. Based on the information, each individual will be entitled to government schemes, including ration from public distribution shops."

"The revenue department will pick up the job of infusing more information once the civil supplies department finishes work of bar-coded ration cards," a senior department bureaucrat said, adding, "We plan to hire agencies to gather data. We expect the work will start in June and will be completed by early next year." The Union government`s National Informatics Centre (NIC) has already prepared software for the whole project.