It appears that both Yahoo and Microsoft are duking it out to help power the technology for India’s Unique Identification project. Spearheaded by Indian tech czar and Infosys co-chairman Nanden Nilekani, the project aims to assign every Indian citizen with a unique identification number that will identify him or her, similar to a U.S. social security number.
This is no small task considering India’s population of 1.2 billion citizens. It will involve a powerful technology to assign the numbers and a vast database to organize each unique ID. That’s where Microsoft and Yahoo come in.
Earlier this year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates expressed a strong interest in participating in the project, meeting Nilekani and assuring him that Microsoft would be able to assign the IDs swiftly.
This week Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz lobbied India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to use Yahoo for the project, but Bartz says that there’s no commercial interest in the deal and Yahoo would help power the project on a non-profit basis. Bartz added that Yahoo would be the optimal choice because Yahoo has a major presence in India. The company claims that three out of four Indians access the Internet through Yahoo.
While Yahoo is vastly popular in India thanks to sites like Yahoo Cricket that appeal to the population, its hold may be slipping. Gmail recently overtook Yahoo Mail as the most trafficked email site and Yahoo was forced to shut down its Indian social network SpotM a few months ago, as Google’s Orkut and Facebook emerge as the dominant social networks in India.
It’s unclear if Microsoft has the same “non-profit” stance as Yahoo, but obviously both companies want a piece of a highly ambitious project that could be implemented in other emerging countries. And it looks like IBM is also throwing its hat into the ring as well, so it should be interesting to see which tech giant wins out.
Photo credit/Flickr/Voobie
I am surprised that India doesn’t have some sort of SSN for everyone.
I just figured it was standard practice to assign somebody an “identification number” when their born.
Ha you should see my birth certificate and passport
SSN numbers were also never meant to be used how they are now; they were never meant for anything besides government use in keeping track of taxes and citizens.
They were never meant to verify info as they are now with most things requiring ssn’s when filling out forms.
Okay the setup was nice, Microsoft, IBM… but err? YAHOO? with Carol “loser” Bartz sucking in? I mean OMG give us a break – 3 of your historical leading founders already quited the company on a one month period. (Icahn, Oijeh, and the PHP founder)
Carol Bartz Mistakes: http://bit.ly/is-carol-bartz-a-loser
Sorry, but I always get infuriated when I see how Yahoo turns out to be.
Let’s just say Yahoo was once the GOOGLE of the late 90’s
Looking forward towards this great project. Wishing Nandan and his team all the best.
Its Nandan and not Naden Nilekani! Jeez
its Geez and not Jeez
LOL
infosys is not at all involved in this project….
That is right… Nilkani has resigned from Infosys and now servers as one the ministers in the Government Of India. Infosys might get a pie of it but officially it is not a part of the project.
Leena- That’s “Nandan” Nilekani.
Thanks,
-Rohan
Its Nandan and not Naden…
This will be interesting news to follow!
Could facbeook help? It is 6 Million and growing really fast in India.
Yes. Facebook username could be the unique ID. Or maybe twitter?
The good intention must be appreciated but a dash of realism is needed. Forget about the vast numbers that are never going to be educated or are not ins school right now, you’d expect colleges and schools to have computers right? Computer penetration and then Internet reach is low, very low.
http://discursive-learning.blogspot.com/2009/01/computer-penetration-in-schools-in.html
True but that does not mean we stop looking forward. We have to keep moving forward while solving current problems.
1.2 billion Indians – assign a number to each and every one of them; Carol Bartz believes since 3/4 Indians access the internet through yahoo, that her company is uniquely qualified to “run” this project for Nilekani and Unique ID. All I say – Good Luck and expect problems, many of them. Logistics will be a nightmare.
It’s Nandan Nilekani. Do some re-search before writing articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandan_Nilekani
What exactly is Microsoft and Yahoo pitching in? Are they proposing the citizens of India use their Yahoo-Ids as their unique identification?
Are they providing their Data Centers to host the Unique-Id project?
What exactly are they proposing?
They are proposing that the ID’s be set on a mixed number-letter system. The numbers would end with either Yahoo.com, Bing.com, or MSN.com depending on that particular Indian’s cast.
Then I take it the ruling elite will get secret Google.com/Gmail.com accounts.
Not entirely sure, but I can see the potential that both companies see in this developing market. By integrating their technology (in what may be a vital position) in the Indian government, these companies might be able to leverage their technology as India enters its high-tech revolution -which is arguably happening right now.
Microsoft/Yahoo aren’t doing this for the current market, but for the market they expect to develop and then monetize in the coming years.
Seems like a no brainer to me, but I am curious in how they specifically will be helping standardize identification across India. Are they going to be the architects? Or does the government have a plan they want implemented?
It also should be good for India as leveraging these companies forces them to make serious commitments to the Indian market – starting with the additional hiring of the many software engineers in the country.
I think the most popular site in india is ESPN’s cricinfo. In that case ESPN should take part in the project.
If Yahoo does get the project, would my Unique ID card have a large ringtone banner ad on it?
If your comparing this to the US social security system, what does this have anything to do with the Internet or which websites Indians visit? Yahoo, who cares how many Indians visit your site(s)?
Isnt this about creating a database of unique identifiers for their ‘citizens’ not their ‘netizens’?
I can’t understand why any ‘Internet’ company would have an advantage over another technology company that has decades of experience building database and profile systems (IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, etc..)
So, will IAC/Ask Jeeves jump into the game also? Maybe CrunchBase could make a pitch and try to get the business as well????
+1
mysql > create table indian_citizens (id bigint not null auto_increment primary key, name varchar(255) not null, dob datetime not null);
there u go problem solved
Good luck with that table when the number of rows reaches 1.2B
This project can further open doors for other government departments to go online and become electronically available. There is more opportunity here and UUID will only help accelerate that.
Simple question:
What entity “owns” the life of individual Indians in India?
Does the Individual “own” their own life and assign an ID to that entity that defines that ownership in a social context?
Or,
Does the Indian Government “own” its citizens, and the Identity is the mechanism of social context in that arrangement?
Americans are owned… not owners… inherently.
Is it the same in India?
ID management is not about Data Convenience.
ID management is about Asset Origination.
R U an Asset U Own?
R U an Asset Owned by your Government?
Owner?
Slave?
Structure yields results.
wtf? what has yahoo got to do with this?
This is going to be a seriously complicated process.
Why is Yahoo considering doing it for no profit? They are hardly in a position to be wasting time and resources on this.
All i want to say to people suggesting twitter Id’s or FB iD’s or for that matter cricinfo.com , guys please understand that internet is not even exposed to half the population of INDIA , so its not that simple creating SSN type numbers and then managing them without glitches.
Its a very complex and hard task , and will see first light in another 4 years approximately
Mix in a lot of corruption with a bit of biometrics, we get a Unique Identification. The card will really do well if it can track how much bribes one take on all levels of society.
They say, it will help eliminate fraud as one of its goals. Duh! Not when fraud and corruption permeates the top echelons of government.
Good luck India. Your problem is not brains or resources, but corruption and lack of justice for the common man, woman and child.
I think that’s precisely the reason that the project will fail. One can look back at the PAN project, a personal unique tax ID for each citizen. People just ended up filing taxes with 10 different PANs, shamelessly.
I think a few people will have to literally sacrifice their whole lives to get this working, and even then people won’t care.
exactly!!
And Nandan Nilekani has jumped in for bribes too. It was too much a temptation for his typical Indian mindset to resist. I am waiting to see how many billions of rupees of our (yes, I’m a common man in India) hard earned money are going to flow down the drain of this corrupt Indian Govt.
This Nilekani fellow came to Devil’s advocate vis-a-vis Karan Thapar and Nilekani had no answers to his concerns about the future of the project.
Damned be the Indian Government! Damned be this “educated” pig called Nilekani for taking up this job!
all said and agreed but you have no right to talk about it when your own country’s common man’ tax goes into bailing out sick old companies who use that money to pay millions of dollars in bonuses to corrupt ceos! and your government treasury is at the mercy of the chinese! and your fiscal defecit at alarming levels! and when half your country is jobless your government instead of helping the common man in the usa is busy donating billions to the pakistanis so they can use that money to plan another 9/11
no country is perfect and india has its own problems but we still manage to grow by 7% each year. we are the largest and fastest growing telecom market in the world (thank god at&t isnt here), we could count our election results for a billion people in a couple of days usingthe electronic voting machine (remember gore bush vote count circus)
in short, last thing we want is the united states style of democracy and capitalism!
Wait, just what exactly is your point? There needs to be a way that this program is unaffected by politicians, but since that is pretty much impossible, I back the program but have low expectations.
I don’t see what this has to do with the Chinese or the Pakistanis, which are valid areas of interest for India’s foreign policy but not for this topic which is wholly an internal affair.
Why do u back the program (being an Indian is no reason)considering the chances that it is going to be a failure (by BIG odds)?
As for the chinese and Pakistanis, Raj was talking about America’s government (he finds it EQUALLY crappy as India’s) How much I hate the assholes who are unable to compare the weight of a feather and a boulder! And how passionately I hate the senseless things that go on (and people who do those) in the name of patriotism!
@IndiaSucks – first off, only a failed frustrated cowardly asshole like you can post comments without your real name
secondly – from your comments and your fake name (IndiaSucks) it appears you have been a terrible failure, both in your personal as well as professional life
and so you see failures into everything (you probably failed your chick in the bed too) and to satisfy your ego that you were’nt responsible for your pathetic state of life, you use words like hate and vent out your frustrations (arised out of your endless failures) by blaming the indian government and finding faults with everything indian
you are probably one of those indians who was a complete failure out here in india, and without any direction and vision slogged it at some shithole university here dreaming of some success in the USA and needless to say your situation has not improved much in the USA too.
needless to say assholes like you would be the first ones to return back to india the day the americans kick you out (when they find out how fucked you are and how badly you are screwing their already screwed up economy) and work at some call center out here doing donkey work for the americans at 1/10th the cost
PS: be a man dude – post comments with your real name – its okay if the world comes to know about your failed life
@arjun – chinese / pakis got nothing to do with this project. that was just to let few readers on tech crunch know crap happens in every country not just here in india… and when your home is full of shit, you cant go and suggest ways to clean up shit in someone elses home
So what do you guys say, should the column be a tinyint or int32? *smirk*
I am surprised to see only foreign companies .. There has been talks like it will be linked with new numbering system TRAI is due to announce or IPV6 linked to it…
Any idea on hw it can be done
Where is Anand, the expert Indian on India?
So sweet of you..I’m here..
Do Indians do infanticide like the Chinese, for gender selection?
If so, there could be a large population of unreported people.
Sadly yes..Still happens in some pockets of rural India..
its Nandan, not Naden…. How dumb can you get… and you are an Indian!!!
That Taj Maha picture is used everytime there is something about India. Why must Indians be stereotyped like that?
If you’re going to stereotype, at least get it right. Why can’t you put a picture of an Indian with head dress sitting at a computer in a cubical– something most of us associate Indians with?
head dress???
head dress?? Indians are not native americans
I didn’t mean feathers. I meant those cotton sheets they wrap around their heads.
Those aren’t “Indians”. India is one of the most diverse countries in terms of religion and socioeconomic status. I doubt there is one image that can depict India, other than its famous landmarks.
What is the difference between Indians with feather and Indians with turban? An Indian is an Indian.
Here is a very accurate picture to associate Indians with:
http://www.reconnections.net/india_tech_support.jpg
Not sure what you mean by cotton sheets, only 2% of Indians wear turbans in India.
This reply is for Steven McCormick
Leena, promise us you will not be lazy the next time you search for images.
Considering that you took some stick for spelling the name wrong, we will cut you some slack
I think Microsoft has more projects with Infosys and wont be surprised if things go the Redmond way. Trust me, of the 1.2 billion people in India, only 50+ people give a damn about this project.