Half of the country's population is likely to be issued Aadhaar numbers in the next four years,Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India Nandan Nilekani said,but refused to give any deadline to complete the project. "We have to cover 1.2 billion people. In the next 4 years,our target is to enroll 600 million people," he said after an event at the prestigious Doon School here. Nilekani said only 3 million people have so far been covered since the launch of the project in September 2009. For providing the logistics,the Centre is setting up a manage service provider for preparing a data bank of the entire project,he said. The UIDAI chief,however,said there was no deadline to complete the project as it involves covering a whopping population of more than 1.2 billion. "It will be big challenge for us to cover the entire population," he said. He said he was getting full cooperation from state governments because the exercise was a "win-win partnership" for both the Centre as well as the states. The total expenditure on the project was Rs 100 per head. Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique number which the UIDAI will issue for all residents. The number will be stored in a centralised database and linked to the basic demographics and biometric information of each individual.
