106/2011 The biggest e-governance project of the world uses FOSS !

I am proud to be an Indian, and a FOSS devotee

Imagine counting 1.2 Billion sheep before you go to sleep. Imagine having to give unique identification numbers to each sheep. This is exactly what the Adhaar project of India is trying to do. Aadhar (http://uidai.gov.in/) is a project of the Government of India, which involves assigning Unique Identification Numbers to each person living in India. India is the second most populous country of the world with about 1 170 938 000 people (basis Wikipedia http://www.google.co.in/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:IND&dl=en&hl=en&q=india+population), which is about 17.5% of the world's population. To add to this huge challenge, the fact that India is not amongst the richest of nations, makes such a project an impossible feat. In addition to counting and identifying every individual, many demographic statistics and biometric indicators are also to be acquired and recorded for each person. India's most prestigious and mammoth e-governance project, makes it unique in the history of Information Technology. And, to assist them in this mammoth and ambitious task, the Government of India (Unique Identification Authority of India UIDAI), chose FOSS tools and technologies. The FOSS tools they chose include :: RabbitMQ, Mule, Hadoop, Pentaho, Apache Tomcat, Mongo DB, Apache Solr, MySQL + + + .

The unique ID is a 12 digit number with some interesting mathematical properties.

What more proof do you want about what FOSS can do for us all ? Why should we still be slaves to vendors who make and sell fliMSy, and cluMSy products ?

Aadhar provides a flood of opportuniies for FOSS developers, to develop related applications.

I am proud to be an Indian, and a FOSS devotee, and I have got my Adhaar number.

partha
(Based on a story which appears in Linux For You, December 2011)