A uniform ID will be issued to all disabled citizens of India within a year, said Thaawar Chand Gehlot, union minister for social justice and empowerment, on Monday.

“The process of generating a uniform ID has already been started and all steps are being taken to complete the same within one year,” he added.

The uniform identification is a central government project that aims to bring the entire data related to disabled citizens on a single web-based platform.
According to the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities (DEPwD), the data provided by states of their disabled citizens is incomplete and not uniform. For this reason, persons with disabilities are not able to benefit from the various welfare schemes. 

With this project, the central government, in coordination with the states, is collecting data that would be centrally monitored and uniform in nature. "This will help us make schemes and policies accordingly," said Awanish Kumar Awasthi, joint secretary, DEPwD.

The ID card issued to every disabled person will carry a 18-digit number and a QR code that will have information such as name, age, address, phone number, type of disability etc. It will be connected to a central database at the back-end. The card will also contain a digital copy of the disability certificate that is issued to persons with disabilities.

Linking all the states online will make data related to disabled people easily accessible to officials of different departments, said Awasthi.

India has nearly 2.68 crore people with some kind of disability, as per the government’s data 2011. However, roughly only one crore out of them have a disability certificate, which is less than 50 percent, according to the DEPwD.