A Cabinet panel headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will decide on Wednesday if the government should spend nearly Rs 15,000 crore more to duplicate an ongoing exercise to capture biometric data. The government had earlier authorised the Registrar General of India under the home ministry to create the National Population Register, a task that required RGI to collect biometric data of nearly one billion people and get them an...

Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia may be okay with a little overlap between the National Population Register exercise and UIDAI's aadhar project, but an earlier note prepared by the Plan Panel had pegged the cost of this duplication at Rs 15,000 crore.  Based on the premise that increased accuracy of iris as a third biometric, as compared to the use of all ten fingerprints, was marginal, the Planning Commission,...

The Prime Minister's Office has intervened in the simmering dispute between the home ministry and the Planning Commission over the capture of Aadhaar biometrics by ensuring that the issue will be taken up by the Cabinet Committee on UID next week. According to a government source, principal secretary to the prime minister Pulok Chatterjee is learnt to have told officials handling the issue that UID, a major initiative of UPA,...

The smart card versus unique identity number battle between P. Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia will hit the ground tomorrow at Porthapur village in Andaman and Nicobar Islands when the home minister hands out the first tranche of 2.56 lakh resident identity cards. The resident cards are a rival to the unique identity number conceived by the Planning Commission to establish authentic identification for each resident and cut out corruption in...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has fully supported Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chief Nandan Nilekani’s effort to enroll all residents of India under the Aadhaar card scheme. Singh has instructed the Planning Commission to bring a proposal before the cabinet to provide statutory powers to UIDAI to enroll beyond the present limit of 20 crore people. The home ministry, which is collecting biometric details of people for creating the National...