After individuals, organisations to enrol for unique entity IDs

After individuals, now even institutions like government departments, schools and companies would get unique identification numbers (UIDs) to enroll the country’s residents for the UID system. These institutions or service delivery organisations would get a UID-like identifier, called Entity ID, which would help enrol people and deliver services.

“Since UID will potentially be used as a primary identifier in several transactions in the financial, health, food distribution, job creation schemes and transactions, it is important to assign an entity ID to the service delivery organisation. We plan to give every registrar an entity ID,” said an official from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the apex agency managing the UID project, which aims to give every resident of the country a unique identity.

For instance, in a financial transaction to transfer money for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the transfer will happen from the UID of a block-level NREGA entity to the UID of the resident to whom the amount is being transferred. This symmetric treatment of both to and from fields will simplify the end-to-end system.

The authority expects that entity ID numbers will have different rules for periods of validity and retirement. The registrars at the state level are the Departments of Rural Development (for NREGS) and Public Distribution and Consumer Affairs (for PDS). At the central level, these entities could be banks, LIC and oil marketing companies. As the National Population Register exercise is also going on, the Registrar General of India will also be a registrar for the purpose of collection of demographic and biometric data for the project.

“We want all the partners to be in the database and then they will verify the people who are being enrolled to the system. These entity IDs will be random numbers. This will be beneficial as the funding will directly go to the people for whom it is meant,” the official added.