Aadhaar was conceived as a way to provide a unique, online, portable identity so that every single resident of India can access and benefit from government and private services. The Aadhaar project has received coverage from all possible media – television, press, articles, debates, and the Internet. It is seen as audacious use of technology, albeit for a social cause. UIDAI, the authority responsible for issuing Aadhaar numbers, has published white-papers, data, and newsletters on progress of the initiative.A common question to the UIDAI technology team in conferences, events and over coffee is – what technologies power this important nation-wide initiative? In this blog post, we wanted to give a sense of several significant technologies and approaches.
Fundamental Principles
While the deployment footprint of the systems has grown from half-a-dozen machines to a few thousand CPU cores processing millions of Aadhaar related transactions, the fundamental principles have remained the same: