A Different Perspective
I know I have been beating about this topic a few times now in the last several weeks, but it is a rather important topic, especially when it comes to the world of Biometrics. After all, this is as of now, deemed to be the world’s largest Biometric project, and its implications down the road, after this project has been completed, can be gargantuan. What am I talking about??? Yep, you got it, it is the project which is currently going on in India, in which the ultimate aim is to register each and every citizen, into a Biometrics database. Today, I came across an editorial which sheds a different perspective upon it.
Here are some of the excerpts from it: “The explosion of IT companies in India has done little to alleviate extreme poverty within the sub continent, but could the biometric ID card programme currently being implemented create real change? . . . Last year I wrote about the project. I did so following the news that tier-two Indian IT services provider MindTree was awarded a software development and maintenance contract to support the complex software that will authenticate every Indian citizen using biometric technology . . . Lahiri [Anjan Lahiri, CEOsaid the pace of enrolment is soon to increase to one million citizens per day.
* The biometric ID card scheme in India will see all 1.3 billion Indian citizens receive an ID card that authenticates their identity through biometric checks.
* It will sign 600million people up in total.
* Each person registered will have an estimated 5 megabytes of data and the datacentre that will hold the information will have 4 Terabytes of data coming into it every day during peak enrolment periods. This will be about the biggest non commercial datacenter in the world.
Lahiri told me last year that the project will succeed in India, where the UK failed, because it is about alleviating poverty rather than privacy.
He described how giving people an identity will allow them to get a bank account. The cornerstone of life these days.
But he went further and explained how the ID scheme will support a cashless society. He said all vendors will have a biometric reader and citizens can pay for things with a fingerprint scan. Even a bag of rice.”
(SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/9063/)
OK, so how does this shed a different perspective than from what I have written about before??? Well, in the past, I have always written about the social implications of Biometrics, but in a very general, or macro sense. In this regard, I have always written things up as to how it can help people (especially those in poor countries) be recognized in the eyes of their own, respective governments. But the problem is, that I could not offer specifics as to how it is helping people. Well, the above excerpts certainly offered that perspective to me. What is it you might be thinking???
Well, Biometrics is not just being used to provide a sense of identity to people, it is also being used to relieve poverty. How does Biometrics do this??? By having a sense of identity, the poorest of the poor citizens in India can stake a claim to what is their own property, and their own assets. This is something which has never, ever happened before in this land which is the second most populous in the world. The editorial even goes on to provide views as to how Biometrics will allow the poor citizens of India to open up bank accounts, and how they can use their own Fingerprint Recognition Template, or even Iris Recognition Template to pay for the most basic necessities in life, of which we take for granted here in the United States on a daily basis. Ultimately, one of the goals of this huge Biometrics project is to make India a cashless society.
That is of course great news to those people who don’t even know what cash looks like. And this point even made me think about the social implications of Biometrics even more. Remember just recently I had written about how a similar project was launched in the United Kingdom, but failed miserably??? They key here is that people viewed as a sheer invasion of privacy, rather than it helping the poor people there. That is why Biometrics is so successful in places like India and other developing nations.
The citizens view this technology as a means to help them, not to hurt them. And here in the United States, given how bad the economy is, there are many people out of work, and who could very well could soon be living in poverty. Perhaps if we took the mindset that Biometrics can help these people, rather than being an invasion of our privacy rights and civil liberties, perhaps the adoption rate of Biometrics would be a lot higher. Something to think about, and food for thought for the Biometrics Industry here in the United States.
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