The document discusses India's Aadhaar identity system, which aims to provide a unique ID number to each of India's 1.2 billion residents. Some key points:
- Aadhaar collects biometric (fingerprint, iris) and demographic data to issue 12-digit IDs and verify identities online.
- It has enrolled over 600 million people so far and handles over 100 million authentication requests per day.
- The system was designed for massive scale using open-source technologies, distributed computing architectures, and principles of security, privacy and interoperability.
- It faces challenges in consistently storing and accessing vast amounts of identity data across distributed databases and data centers.