We have been tracking the UID project headed by Nandan Nilekani since its announcement in India and have been analysing its impact as well on various industries and players. We have questioned as to how this massive project would be completed and which route would it take? Whether it will be mobile? or something else?
Now it seems players from the technology world have started expressing their interest in aiding this massive project. So Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz who was down in India expressed her interest in helping the Indian government with the project. The Yahoo CEO said, “The UID project involves a huge database. We, at Yahoo, have expertise in handling such huge amount of data. We met the Prime Minister today and discussed, among other things, how Yahoo can help the Government in the project,”
There are ofcourse other technology players too like Cisco and Intel who have expressed their interest and are in talks with Mr.Nilekani as well as to what role they can play in this project. The reason for this all round interest is the fact that this project is massive by every sense of the term. The UID is estimated to offer a Rs 15,000-20,000 crore opportunity to computing, database, smartcard and storage vendors, besides systems integrators. For every rupee of IT spend on the UID project, industry experts estimate, around 60 per cent of the spending will go to hardware vendors. Also as we reported earlier the project is expected to have online authentication which makes it even more lucrative for players like Yahoo to pitch in.
Im sure even Google would be in the fray and would be talking to Nilekani on their role. After all Google is the largest web player in India with reach even in rural areas via buses and with its recent interest in wimaxing the country it can’t be ignored as an important player for this project.
