Unisys to partner local IT companies to bid for UID project

The company has already deployed identity, biometric and immigration control solutions in countries such as Australia, Malaysia, the US, Panama, Canada and Angola.

"We are in advance talks with TCS, Wipro and Tech Mahindra for a local partnership to bid for the national UID project of India. Interestingly, all our global biometric and fingerprinting solutions, used at FBI, US Border Control and Australian passport authorities, are developed out of our delivery centre in Bangalore. We want to leverage the same now for the India market," said John Kendall, national security program director, Unisys Global Public Sector.

With around $5.2 billion in revenues, Unisys employs 2,000 engineers across its development centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

"The arrangements for local partnerships will be non-exclusive in nature. Thus we might bid for two or more zones. We will offer our IP in biometric and ID solutions in return to the local partners," Mr Kendall told ET, after a meeting with National Informatics Centre director general BK Gairola.

Currently in the conceptualisation and design stage, Unique ID may well be the largest e-governance projects ever rolled out in India. The past few weeks have seen global heads of major IT corporations flying down to India to express interest in the project. These include the likes of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

"The cost of taking fingerprints from each of the 1.2-billion citizens will be over Rs 5,000 crore, which makes it a sufficiently large project," Mr Kendall added.

As one of the eight Central Mission Mode Projects, UIDAI (Unique ID Authority of India) plans to dole out the first set of ID numbers in 2010. It has also set up an internal panel to identify the kind of biometric identifier to be used for collecting data.

Biometric identifiers are essential as duplication of other ID cards is mainly used to embezzle welfare funds. Funds under the National Rural Employment Gurantee Act are prone to fraud, as are the pension funds. In India, the Employee Provident Fund Organisation has offered its database of 42 million citizens for the UID project to start with.

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