BBC: “In an audacious technological mission, India is building a near foolproof database of personal biometric identities for nearly a billion people, something that has never been attempted anywhere in the world.
Poorer Indians who have no proof to offer of their existence will leapfrog into a national online system, another global first, where their identities can be validated anytime anywhere in a few seconds.
“India will outdo the world’s biggest biometric databases including those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US-VISIT visa programme,” says Nandan Nilekani, the technology tycoon who heads the programme popularly called by its acronym UIDAI.
The United States’ visa programme is a biometric database of 120 million.
In comparison, the UIDAI has already registered 200 million members, less than two years after the first enrolment.
By 2014 half of India’s population will have an identity tagged to a random, unique 12-digit number.
As more and more Indians have their fingerprints taken, irises scanned and photographs clicked, UIDAI’s chief technology architect Pramod Varma describes the database structure as a “Google-meets-Facebook” scale out.
The information is stored in a fortress like data centre in Bangalore
With its internet-class open source backbone, the database will accommodate more than 12 billion fingerprints, 2.4 billion iris scans and 1.2 billion photographs.
Even more groundbreaking, once established and stored, a person’s identity can easily be verified and authenticated using a cell phone, smart phone, tablet or any other device hooked to the internet.
The information is stored in a fortress-like data centre in Bangalore with a triple layer of security, and travels in highly encrypted packets.
Many of the radical ideas for UIDAI’s technology have come from the talent the project has drawn from the Indian diaspora – tech entrepreneurs like Bala Parthasarathy of HP-acquired photo service, Snapfish and Silicon Valley returnees like Srikanth Nadhamuni, formerly with Intel.
Mr Nilekani himself co-founded and built the multi-billion dollar outsourcing company Infosys before being drafted by the government to head the project.
The programme has studied global best practices in biometric identity databases.
Unlike the United States’ social security number, which is guessable and China’s, which adds the date of birth, India’s 12-digit identity number is randomly generated.
The United States’ visa database does not factor in iris scans while India has included them to provide a greater degree of accuracy.
India’s telecom revolution leapfrogged over several stages of technology in the past decade-and-a-half to great success. Similarly, the massive UIDAI will vault over older technologies.
“By starting on a clean slate and reconfiguring the structure, we have opened up a whole new set of possibilities,” says Mr Nilekani.
The project will stay abreast of the latest in biometrics, cloud computing and connectivity.
Pilot projects using the unique number have begun in parts of India
Costs though have been kept low, first, by adopting an open policy in selecting devices and software and encouraging multiple private vendors.
Second, the project is technology-neutral, not locking in to any particular hardware or software.
If the technology architecture is unique, so is its accuracy in validating identities.
“The combination of 10-finger biometrics, two-iris scans and photograph establishes the identity of a person with over 99.5% accuracy,” says Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO of Bangalore-based tech outsourcing firm MindTree, which is one of the firms building applications for the project.
The best of the biometric databases in the world have a single de-duplication check, to ensure that every person is identified and tagged only once.”
via BBC News – Why India’s identity scheme is groundbreaking.
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