How can corporates aid the UID project?

Excerpts from India Business Hour on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » RELATED NEWS Mah Satyam shortlisted for UID project: Dilip Jha UIDAI calls for quotations for first IT contract: Sources UID's first enrolment to take place by Aug '10: Nilekani Nifty BSE | NSE 17/02/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

The Indian government is moving forward with its plans to provide its citizens with a Unique Identification (UID) number. The project involves biometric authentication behind the system, which will mean creating the world's largest biometric database covering data of over 1 billion people. The project will be one of the most ambitious marketing exercises undertaken in India.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of the UID project, Nitin Paranjpe, MD & CEO, HUL and Kishore Biyani, Chairman, Future Group spoke about the ambitious project and how corporates can help in setting up the project.

Q: Tell us about the UID project?

Nilekani: We have actually taken this project as an example of public participation. We had a logo campaign and we got over 2,000 entries and some really brilliant ones. We have sort of a marketing and strategy consulting group. We have a volunteer programme where a lot of people are coming and volunteering to work with us. We have a sabbatical program where companies can depute some bright talent to us for a couple of years and then go back to their parent company.

What we are finding in many companies there are a lot of youngsters who want to do something meaningful for a couple of years in the social world. So we have volunteer sabbatical programme. We generally want this to be a public participative project because it is not limited to a few people. It is about getting everybody energized. So anyway they can help we'll be happy.