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New Delhi: Kartik Burman, 46, is a rag picker from Bengal, living near Nizamuddin in Delhi for the past 10 years.

He is being enrolled for the Unique Identification Project or the UID. So when he goes out to demand a job under NREGA or get a ration card he won’t have a problem. The likes of this old rag picker too are hoping for a better deal in life.

Mukhtar Ahmed, homeless, says, "It will help, I can get a job and I can get a ration card".

But there are others who have no idea how the card they’re holding will help them.

Sant Ram, a tailor, slams the project. "I don’t know what this means, I will understand only if someone explains it to me?"

The UID number is allotted two weeks after enrollment. A bank account is opened and the card holder is officially identified as a resident of India.

But are there privacy and security concerns?

Nandan Nilekani, chairman, UID Project explains, "The benefit for a few hundred million poor people of India who don’t have an identity, who don’t get benefits. Giving them this is more important than the risk. And we must ensure that the risks are completely mitigated"

The benefits are already being felt by the likes of daily wage labourer Ram Babu who finally has a cellphone thanks to his UID. "Before I had no identification, so I how could I get a number, now I have it thanks to this"

The ambitious 3000 crore UID project starts becoming a reality in small pockets like these where the poorest of the poor are being identified. Its estimated that by 2014, 600 million Indian residents will have UID numbers.

Even beggars like Hari Singh - living on the railway tracks under Delhi’s Okhla flyover - have hope that thanks to a few digits, life could get better. As the project goes digging through the narrow gullies of India, it seems to be a start in the right direction. The only hope is that this ambitious project doesn’t turn into a series of empty promises for India’s poor.