ktlight
2nd May 2011, 10:25
In India, a few million people have been registered so far--only a billion left to go
THUMB DRIVE: A program aiming to provide biometric IDs to all Indians has begun with a few million rural residents. This woman from a village near Bangalore is having her fingerprints and irises scanned and her photo taken. When the project is complete, India will have the largest biometric ID database in the world.
Identity is easy to take for granted. Most of us have multiple legal documents or ID cards that prove we are who we say we are. But for many of the world's poorest citizens, the lack of legal identity is a barrier to participating in commerce and receiving services.
In India, an estimated 500 million people have no form of reliable identification. It's a problem the Indian government has set out to fix through a five-year project with a budget of US $430 million for this year. Starting six months ago with rural populations, the government has begun to create a biometric database that will eventually contain an unprecedented hundreds of millions of records. "We are talking about 10 times more than anything else that has been done before," says Anil Jain, an IEEE Fellow and distinguished professor at Michigan State University, who is an expert in biometrics.
From each volunteer participant, the government collects 10 fingerprints, 2 iris images, and a photo, and if the new data don't match any identity already enrolled, it assigns the person a unique 12-digit number. After that, a single fingerprint or iris scan should be all that's needed to verify the identity of any person. As of the end of March, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has registered more than 4 million people this way. The UIDAI hopes to eventually collect biometrics from a majority of the Indian population.
India has many federal and state programs to help people living in poverty, but today it's nearly impossible to be sure that funds and benefits are actually being delivered to those who need them. The ID project is an attempt to cut down on fraud and graft by increasing accountability and transparency. It's also meant to provide access to banking and the formal economy that many people lack.
source
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/fast-start-for-worlds-biggest-biometrics-id-project
THUMB DRIVE: A program aiming to provide biometric IDs to all Indians has begun with a few million rural residents. This woman from a village near Bangalore is having her fingerprints and irises scanned and her photo taken. When the project is complete, India will have the largest biometric ID database in the world.
Identity is easy to take for granted. Most of us have multiple legal documents or ID cards that prove we are who we say we are. But for many of the world's poorest citizens, the lack of legal identity is a barrier to participating in commerce and receiving services.
In India, an estimated 500 million people have no form of reliable identification. It's a problem the Indian government has set out to fix through a five-year project with a budget of US $430 million for this year. Starting six months ago with rural populations, the government has begun to create a biometric database that will eventually contain an unprecedented hundreds of millions of records. "We are talking about 10 times more than anything else that has been done before," says Anil Jain, an IEEE Fellow and distinguished professor at Michigan State University, who is an expert in biometrics.
From each volunteer participant, the government collects 10 fingerprints, 2 iris images, and a photo, and if the new data don't match any identity already enrolled, it assigns the person a unique 12-digit number. After that, a single fingerprint or iris scan should be all that's needed to verify the identity of any person. As of the end of March, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has registered more than 4 million people this way. The UIDAI hopes to eventually collect biometrics from a majority of the Indian population.
India has many federal and state programs to help people living in poverty, but today it's nearly impossible to be sure that funds and benefits are actually being delivered to those who need them. The ID project is an attempt to cut down on fraud and graft by increasing accountability and transparency. It's also meant to provide access to banking and the formal economy that many people lack.
source
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/fast-start-for-worlds-biggest-biometrics-id-project