The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is working with global organisations such as the World Bank and the United Nations to develop an international identity system, building on the experience of Aadhaar, UIDAI’s Chief Executive Officer Saurabh Garg said on December 2.
He was speaking at the Digital Money Conference, organised by the Payments Council of India.
“This [Universal Global Identity System] is something we are very actively working upon, we have got a number of queries from a large number of countries, both in our neighbourhood — Asia — and across the world. We had a number of discussions with them, some countries have already adopted the kind of architecture that we have used and others are keen to do that,” Mr. Garg added.
Aadhaar, which covered about 99.5% of the adult population, was an architecture which had built-in privacy by design, he said. “The way we only allow use of Aadhaar by way of consent and secondly, in terms of information security that takes prime importance for us. We have our data centres and we keep them isolated. They are only accessed through the secured and identified and friendly mechanisms. We don’t allow any unknown method of accessing our systems,” he said.
He added, “We have multiple firewalls which we continue to update, we have 24X7 security operation centres, we continuously get feeds from agencies and intelligence on what is happening. Security of the data and system is of utmost importance to us.”
