Draft bill on UIDAI to be ready within a month: Nandan Nilekani

New Delhi, May 12 (ANI): Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the draft bill on the Unique Identity Project would be made ready for public discussion within a month's time.

Talking to reporters on the sidelines of a function here on Tuesday, Nilekani said: "We need a UIDAI Act to govern the regulatory bodies; for that purpose we are drafting something, which we will put out in the next three to four weeks for public discussion."

"The project would address issues of multiple identities and thereby plug leakages in various welfare schemes mooted by the government, he added.

"Right now we are doing proof of concept in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar. Then starting some pilot roll out in next few months and we have told earlier we will have UID roll out between August of this year and February of next year. We intend to stick on to these dates," he said.

The Unique Identification Project has two aspects - one to provide a unique identification number to all Indians and second to provide online authentication.

Once the unique identification number starts to be accepted as an identity proof, it will benefit millions of poor Indians without any identification, access public services.

The identification would be biometrics based and the database would be a private database which could be used only for authentication.

The first set of identifications is expected to be rolled out by February 2011 and around 600 million Indians would be enrolled over the next four years. (ANI)