UIDAI shortlists nine IT firms for Rs 2,000-cr deal

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has shortlisted nine information technology service companies for the managed services provider (MSP) contract. The contract is estimated to be worth around Rs 2,000 crore.

Tata Consultancy Services, IBM, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra are some of these. These companies will first give their proposals for implementing and managing the central information data repository of UIDAI. The bidding process will start soon thereafter.

The selection of the services provider will be crucial, as the firm will be responsible for the roll out of the 600-million Aadhaar numbers by 2014. More, the MSP vendor will have to provide a system and be involved in the de-duplication process. That means every time someone sends a biometric print, the systems need to match these and get back to the person in real time.

The government had kept a steep eligibility criterion for interested parties, which were required to have revenues of over Rs 6,000 crore annually and net worth of Rs 4,000 crore. It had to change this as many of the Indian vendors protested.
 

AADHAAR CALL 

* Accenture Services

* HCL Infosystems

* HP India Sales

* HCL Technologies

* IBM India 

* Mahindra Satyam

* TCS

* Tech Mahindra

* Wipro Ltd.

This is the fourth IT contract from UIDAI. The first was for a consulting partner for UIDAI, of the size of Rs 7.05 crore; it was bagged by consultancy firm Ernst & Young. It was followed by the Rs 19-crore contract for application development services, bagged by Bangalore-based Mindtree. A consortium led by Mahindra Satyam, and including Morpho, Accenture and L1 Identity Solutions, bagged the contract to implement the core biometric identification system for the Aadhaar programme.