National Innovation Council: Encouraging innovations

Behind every big movement lies the germ of a great idea, behind every change the power of thought that be at government, society or our systems, changes can only begin with an idea. It is to plant these ideas that the National Innovation Council is working.

The Council has set itself a five pronged approach to introduce all around innovation across platform, discourse inclusion, drivers and ecosystem. This will encourage widespread innovations in product, services, processes and create transformative innovations at all levels. The two in the hand of the National Innovation Council is the Unique Identification Number being created by the UIDAI headed by Nandan Nilekani.  

Established in 2009, the Unique Authority of India or the UIDAI is presently in the process of giving out the UID or Aadhaar Cards. The 12 digit number, which is to be linked to a person's demographic and biometric information, can be used by individuals to identify them across the country in order to access a host of benefits and services. Aadhaar's guarantee of uniqueness and its centralised online identity verification promises to be the bases for building multiple services and applications. These 12 digits could well be a real hope for tomorrow's India whilst serving as the perfect platform for the National Innovation Council to implement its ideas.

Sam Pitroda, Chairman of National Innovation Council says, "UID is an instrument to document our residents and citizens. Today, we don't have a framework to document each individual in the country, either you have passport or you have driving license or maybe ration card. So, on an average, you could have 10 IDs. So, UID gives one number for one person and one person to have one number. It then matches you with your face, fingerprints, iris, address, birth date etc. So, when you move, the number moves with you and sort of in a sense gives you identification. 

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