My Hometown
As many of my readers and subscribers know, my origins are that of Indian. Both my parents came from India, specifically, my mother came from a town called “Pune” (geographically located in a province called “Maharashtra”), and my father came from a town called “Mysore” (also, located in province called “Karnataka”). The last time I visited India was back in 2001, but before that, I used to visit India on a fairly regular basis about every two to three years. But believe me, I do plan to go back soon, with my wife to be Anita, and to have an Indian style wedding as well. Although I would visit family in different parts of India, Pune usually became the port of call where we would spend most of the time.
And to my surprise, as I was thinking about all of this today, I came across a Press Release which discusses the use of Biometrics in Maharashtra. Here are the details: “The Government of Maharashtra has awarded Accenture a three-year, management consulting and technology contract to help manage the administration of labor laws and create a management system to support services ranging from renewal of licenses to filing online grievances through an interactive portal . . . The contract supports the Mahashramm initiative, designed to better manage and track services and payments through collaboration with banks for India’s unorganized workforce of 20 million people. The program is unique in size and scale and has been cited by the International Labor Organization (ILO) as one of the leading best practices in the world . . . Accenture will help implement a management framework and technology system to provide services, including registration and filing of applications, by building an online portal and creating a database to provide financial inclusion to unorganized workers using biometric signatures. This phase will be integrated with the Unique Identification Program (UID) of the Government of India.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/industry-news/i/9371/).
My Take
Although the dollar volume of this contract with Accenture was not specifically disclosed, obviously one can tell that it is a fairly sizable contract. Well heck, any time a security or a Biometrics contract is awarded in India, it is always big, given its gargantuan population. Now many of you also know that India is also home to what is deemed to be the world’s largest Biometrics project. Long story short, the goal here is to register every person in massive Biometrics databases, via the iris, vein pattern, or finger. But this contract as described above is unique in the sense that Biometrics will be used to help to streamline and make more efficient India’s relationships between its government and businesses toward its labor force.
In other words, trying to improve the labor flow processes over there, specifically focusing upon India’s “unorganized” labor force, of some 20 million people. What unorganized exactly means, I have no idea. But to give some notion as to just how large India’s workforce is, Indian Railways, which oversees the nation’s rail and train infrastructure, is presently, the world’s largest employer. This ranges all the way from the people whom drive the train to the people who sweep the cow dung off the platforms. So, as you can see from the above quote, the major goal of this project is to provide a web based portal in which these unorganized workers can help organize their workflow processes (such as filing complaints, viewing financial information such as pay stubs, and the like, etc). And of course, it is Fingerprint Recognition which will be used (for something like this, why not used something tried and true???) for the workers to identify themselves in the web portal, and in the database itself.
As I read this, it is really touching to me. Although I have never lived in India, I have visited for long periods of time. And what we take for granted here in the United States (such as automated processes every where we go) is not so in India. Although India is very technologically oriented, its most basic infrastructure still has yet to be modernized. In this regard, everything is still done in a very time intensive and consuming process. The perfect example of this are the banks in Pune. When I visited last, believe it or not, deposits into accounts were taken on paper and pencil ledgers. And taking my mom to the hospital to get her potassium levels recorded was all done with the traditional manual processes.
Now these are just examples, but the use of manual processes versus automated still exists virtually in all parts of India, and for foreigners visiting (and even the Indian citizens as well), this is extremely frustrating. Hopefully, as a result of the use of Biometrics, these types and kinds of manual processes will cease to exist, making everybody’s life there just a lot easier.
This quote best sums up what I am trying to get for this posting: “[This contract will hopefully] . . . will create a model of labor laws and decent working conditions for the unorganized and informal labor force not only in the State of Maharashtra, but also in the rest of the world.” (SOURCE: http://www.findbiometrics.com/industry-news/i/9371/). But in the end, hopefully automation in India will not just be felt in this sector, but in all of the daily parts of life, which again, we take here for granted every day.
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