And by encouraging people to open 150m new bank accounts, linked to a biometric database of 850m people so far, the government is creating a structure to provide better poverty relief.As welcome as this is, it sells India short.
FOR a country that fails to meet its most basic challenges feeding the hungry, piping clean water, fixing roads it seems incredible that India is rapidly building the world's biggest, most advanced, biometric database of personal identities.
The United States' visa programme is a biometric database of 120 million.
These measures include reviewing the files of more than 340,000 police officers and soldiers already recruited, a long-awaited biometric database of service members and a much more detailed examination of their backgrounds and family connections.
In recent proposals, Congress has considered implementing a digitalized biometric identification card such as a biometric-based, "high-tech" Social Security Card which may eventually lead to the development of a universal multimodal biometric database (e.g., the collection of the digital photos, fingerprints, iris scans, and/or DNA of all citizens and noncitizens).
Michigan State University professor Anil K. Jain, who runs the school's biometric research program and has six patents in fingerprint matching, says companies and governments who use the devices need to be careful; like any technology, it is susceptible to both machine and human error, and any biometric database runs the risk of being hacked.
NEW DELHI — An Indian government agency has filed a police complaint against a journalist who exposed a possible security breach in the country's vast biometric database that contains the personal details of more than 1 billion citizens, raising fresh concerns about shrinking press freedom in India.
For the past nine years, India has been building the world's biggest biometric database by collecting the fingerprints, iris scans and photos of nearly 1.3 billion people.
India's identity database will be an order of magnitude larger than the world's largest existing biometric database, the US-Visit program for visas, which has data on about 100 million people.
"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.
