A peek at the tech requirements for India's UID project

Why is India’s UID Aadhar a Big Data challenge and opportunity? (Information Week)

Everything about India’s UID project or Aadhar as it is commonly known is ambitious. Giving a unique identity to 1.2 billion residents is a challenging task. No country has done a project of this scale – which is why this project is being watched keenly by everyone - not only in India, but the rest of the world too.

Let's look at some interesting facts about Aadhar. The scope is to capture 12 billion fingerprints, 1.2 billion photographs, and 2.4 billion iris scans. The file size for each enrollment is approximately 5 Mb. When you summarize this for 1.2 billion people, the file size would be measured in petabytes. This is just the storage part.

De-duplication, also addressed in the article, is the really crazy part, though.