Those with cooking gas connections or drawing food and kerosene from ration shops, farmers with kisan credit cards or working in rural employment guarantee scheme will be the first to get unique identity numbers. They will be allotted the numbers within 12 months.

The Unique Identification Authority of India will float tenders to enlist vendors who will issue the numbers. This was decided at a meeting between the authority’s chairman, Nandan Nilekani, and finance ministry officials last week.

For the purpose, the authority will set norms for bidding, which will be open to both Indian and foreign software and hardware companies. A finance ministry official said technological competence in software and hardware, besides networks and price, would be the determinants.

The allocation of unique identity numbers will be followed by the issue of cards. The priority lists will be drawn from voter lists and databases of the income-tax, customs and excise departments, besides the list of beneficiaries of state government schemes.

Nilekani is on record that in the first phase of issue of unique identity numbers and cards will be completed between August this year and next February.

In the economic survey tabled last month, the government gave itself 12 to 18 months to begin the issue of numbers. In four years, over 600 million Indians will be covered.

The 2010-11 budget set aside Rs 1,900 crore for the identification number project. This year, the allocation was only Rs 100 crore.

Last week’s meeting also discussed making the Union government’s IT networks secure and reliable. An inter-ministerial technology advisory group for the unique projects (Tagup) headed by Nilekani will take shape by this month-end.

The targeted systems for revamp are the tax information network, the new pension scheme, national treasury management, expenditure information network and goods and services tax. Tagup was announced in the budget to look into various technological and systemic issues.

Nilekani told Financial Chronicle, “This was just a preliminary meeting on how to form a committee for the first phase of unique identification numbers.”

He said the terms of reference and the names of Tagup committee members would be decided by the end of this month.

Rural employment guarantee households alone number 45 million. They and also those using buying food, fertilisers and fuel are on the first list because the government hopes the unique numbers will help plug pilferage of funds and goods and also eliminate fake beneficiaries.