Following the footsteps of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, the Employees Provident Fund Organisation has entrusted the UTI Investor Services with the job of creating the required infrastructure for issuing its much-bragged social security number.

"The Central Board of Trustee of EPFO has approved the outsourcing of technical infrastructure, including hardware from UTIISL," Ajai Singh, the central provident fund commissioner told PTI in New Delhi on Friday.

At the recent CBT meeting, the board had given "in principle" approval for appointing UTIISL for facilitating the issuance of SSN, which is expected to cover 50 lakh people this year, and UTIISL is expected to kickstart the work in the next 4-6 weeks.

The move comes close on the heels of CBDT engaging UTIISL for issuing the permanent account number cards.

Unlike CBDT, which had entrusted UTIISL with the data collection and issuance of PAN cards, the EPFO would do the data collection and mining by itself and decided to outsource only the technical infrastructure.

The UTIISL would be required to deploy and operate technical infrastructure for SSN on a lease, hire or purchase model as well as print, collate and dispatch SSN cards.

The data collected would be fed into the National Data Centre at Belapur (in Maharashtra), which generates the SSN.

B S Pundit, chief executive officer, UTIISL, said it was yet to hear from the EPFO.

The UTIISL would have to put in place the IT infrastructure for CBT's much-touted networking at six pilot sites including Delhi, Kota, Patna, Hyderabad, Indore and Mangalore and a centralised computer system at Dwaraka for issuing 50 lakh national social security numbers this year.

The technical committee of the CBT had viewed that once the full-blown architecture was put in place, EPFO would have the option to retain the present infrastructure being set up by UTIISL.

This move comes as part of Labour Minister Sahib Singh Verma's business process re-engineering, slated to cost about Rs 6.5 crore (Rs 65 million).

The various modules of the BPR comprise robust software, central database, appropriate high-end central hardware, network, appropriate bio-metric software and appointment of data entry vendors.

With the new system, which is expected to cover 106 sites across the country over a period of time, subscribers could get the information on their EPF accounts from anywhere and the amount could be taken from any designated ATM.