Nearly half of India’s population would have the Aadhaar card by 2014 and nearly one in three Indians by the end of this year, Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Nandan Nilekani said here today.

The ambitious project – which has issued unique identification numbers to more than 380 million people, which is large than the population of several large countries in just a few years – would still take a few more years before every Indian resident is issued with this unique number and the card having the biometric information of the individual, Nilekani told a Washington audience.

Delivering the Eighth Annual Richard H Sabot Lecture ’Technology to Leapfrog Development: The Aadhaar Experience’ organised by Center for Global Development – a Washington-based think-tank, Nilekani said UIDAI has leveraged the state of the art technology of the present days to provide unique identification number to every resident of the country.

“Today we have enrolled 380 million of the 1.2 billion people. Our daily processing is about a million people a day.

“Our goal is to reach 400 million this year and 600 million by 2014,” he said, adding there are 25,000 to 30,000 enrolment centres in the country.

Noting that this unique identification number is now becoming “an internal passport and gateway” to various services for Indians, Nilekani said by working with various regulators they have ensured that this ID is sufficient to get their services.

It enables one to get services quick and hassle free, he said.

“People see this as a gateway to many services,” he said, adding over the next few years he expects this to be used for different kinds of services including the ambitious direct cash transfer scheme of the Union government.

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