New Delhi: It seems that both Yahoo and Microsoft are in the race to power the technology for India's Unique Identification project. Headed by Indian tech czar Nandan Nilekani, the project aims to assign every Indian citizen with a unique identification number that will identify him or her, similar to a U.S. social security number.

This project is likely to involve a powerful technology to assign the numbers and a vast database to organize each unique ID. That's where Microsoft and Yahoo come in.

Earlier this year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates expressed a strong interest in participating in the project, meeting Nilekani and assuring him that Microsoft would be able to assign the IDs swiftly.

This week, when Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz met India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, she requested to use Yahoo for the project, but she also mentioned that there's no commercial interest in the deal and Yahoo would help to power the project on a non-profit basis. Bartz added that Yahoo should be the optimal choice because it has a major presence in India. The company claims that three out of four Indians access the internet through Yahoo.

It's unclear that if Microsoft has the same 'non-profit' stance as Yahoo, but obviously both companies want a piece of a highly ambitious project that could be implemented in other emerging countries. It looks like IBM is also throwing its hat into the ring as well, so it should be interesting to see which tech giant wins out