An Update
As many of you know, India is home to what is deemed as the world’s largest Biometric project. Meaning, the population of some 1.3 + Billion people are going to be registered with either an Iris, Facial, or Fingerprint Recognition system. How on earth all this will happen beats me. But oh well. Today, a Biometrics just announced that it has been certified by the Indian government to go ahead and start providing its Biometric solutions and products to this project.
The details: “Cross Match Technologies, Inc., a leading global provider of biometric identity solutions, announced today that it has been certified as one of the first suppliers of biometric devices for India’s unique identification (UID) program. This milestone signifies that the company has successfully completed a rigorous two-step certification process and has received the Certificate of Approval from the Indian Government to continue to supply the program . . . Cross Match received the Certificate of Approval for its rugged and dependable Guardian fingerprint capture device and the I SCAN dual iris capture device on October 7, 2011. Both systems utilize Cross Match’s patented Auto Capture feature, which quickly captures high-quality images with minimal operator involvement.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/industry-news/i/9314/).
The Bottom Line
This is obviously good news to the Biometrics Vendor, as they are amongst one of the first suppliers to be approved. Meaning, they can now stake their claim onto this lucrative market. There are other Biometrics Vendors involved with this, I can’t remember each and every one of them. The Biometrics Technologies which will be employed in this regard include both Fingerprint Recognition and Iris Recognition. It just won’t be for what I term “delicate usage” (such as an SSO), but rather the needs are much more rugged, as Indian Government officials will have to travel to some of the remotest, rugged, and desolate places on earth in order to count each and every citizen.
In other words, it appears that live scan methodologies are being used. The use of these two technologies come to of no surprise to me, as even in Afghanistan, these two are also used quite heavily to lend out food aid and other critical items to the people living there. This Biometrics solution being offered by this Vendor was strictly measured across a number of key criterion, which include:
*Ease of use and ergonomics;
*Biometric template image quality;
*Interoperability;
*Performance;
*Safety/security
Since I am of Indian origin, I have been to India a number of times in the past, most recently back in 2001. Believe me, life there is not easy, and in order to succeed, you either have to a solid education or a lot of money. There are a lot of poor people living out there, and probably the one place that comes to mind are the slums around Mumbai airport. I just don’t know how each and every person will be counted there, as many of them migrate around in search of better times and opportunities.
Heck, according to the Press Release, there just some 600+ Million people living in desolation in India. That is almost half of the entire Indian population, and more than more than twice of the entire American population. Personally, to me, just trying to get that amount of people to register in all of these Biometric systems will be a feat in itself (this Biometrics Vendor alone has captured some 20,000+ fingerprint and iris templates). One has to start thinking where these people are actually even living. To use a crude example, it is like trying to find mice in their holes, as they scurry around. But knowing the Indian people, they will succeed in this gargantuan project.
And I will provide updates along the way till the project comes to completion. After all, although I am a US citizen, I still consider India very much to be home, and I am very proud of my heritage and culture there.
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