Bangalore: The Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) hit a milestone this week when it crossed close to 120 million enrollments to become the largest biometric identification system in the world.
Announcing the milestone, Srikanth Nadhamuni, head of technology, UIDAI, said this means the UIDAI database will now be bigger than the FBI database and the US visa entry system—the two largest biometric databases in the world.
File photo of UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani
This has been possible due to the ecosystem of partners, he added. Currently, UIDAI has nearly 95,924 operators and 20,000 agencies working with UIDAI for the enrollment of 200 million people.
The UIDAI also released preliminary figures from a study to ascertain the rate of failure to enroll. After conducting a study on a database of 84 million, this was estimated at just 0.14%, Nadhamuni said.
He added that, “99.86% of the population can be uniquely identified by our biometric system and even the remaining 0.14% of the population can be enrolled by demographic de-duplication and manual inspection.”
The study also showed impressive results for the failure to identify duplicate or fake enrollments—only 0.035% of duplicates are not correctly identified.
UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani said the agency is in the process of considering innovative applications for the identification scheme. Entitlement probability across outlets is one of the areas the UIDAI hopes the government will take up. In the future, a resident should be able to shift locations and still access his entitlements from another location, he said.
“Once a chap from a village in Chhattisgarh moves to Raipur, then his entitlement should also be portable along with him,” he added.
On recent reports about differences with the home ministry over the duplication of collection of biometric data, Nilekani said that the cabinet will meet soon and the matter will be resolved.
shamsheer.y@livemint.com
