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India – what a wonderful country! Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to travel a number of times to this beautiful land and on each trip, my eyes have been opened in wonder at the amazing things the country and people have to offer. 

India is one of the world’s busiest, most populated places – and yet the people are among the most polite, accommodating, humble and smart you will encounter. They have significant social challenges, however, and an inability to prove identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing citizens from accessing benefits and subsidies. Recently, they undertook a very brave step to improve the welfare of their citizens.  You may have read from a press release or noticed in the media that Daon has been selected to participate in the world’s largest biometric system, which is being procured by the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI).

The Unique ID will allow residents to access critical programs, while decreasing leakages, increasing revenue, and significantly bringing down transaction costs as it transforms the delivery of social welfare programs.

The aim of the UIDAI initiative is truly ground-breaking. They will establish a unique identity for all of India’s 1.2 billion residents that dramatically simplifies and eases their interaction with government agencies – in particular with benefits management and social programs. Effectively, a system that protects the core identity of the country’s residents while allowing them to confidentially and securely assert their identity when accessing government and commercial services. 

At a conference in 2009, one of the senior members of the UID technical team mentioned that the scale of the system was somewhere between 900 million and 1.2 billion people. When I met him afterwards, I couldn’t help remarking that his “rounding error” was bigger than any existing biometric system! The sheer scale of this system is astonishing and I could write pages and pages – but blogs are meant to be short and to the point. 

So what does it all mean (top 5 things)?

1. A positive effect on 1 billion+ people. At the most fundamental level, it means a better quality of life for over a billion people. You have to see India to truly experience the ground-breaking nature of this program. I have worked on many biometric systems around the world but none have struck me as having the potential to impart such a profoundly positive benefit to the everyday lives of people by driving out fraud, waste and abuse and allowing people to assert their identity in a unique and consistent way to ensure they receive the benefits and rights they are legally entitled to.  
2. The importance of COTS in biometric identity systems. The UIDAI had a very strong desire for COTS and open source (where applicable) in the bidders solutions. This was further reinforced during the demonstration phase. Quite honestly, if you didn’t have the product ready to go, you had little chance of getting through the demonstration phase. The timeline was tight and the testing broad and encompassing.
3. The need for multi-biometric platforms. Much of the world has traditionally focused on fingerprint – although there has been a broad recognition of the need for multi-biometric systems for many years. However, there have been limited deployments of large scale multi-biometric systems to date. This is changing. The Mexican National ID program and this one  are two recent examples of very large scale adoption of systems that are designed from day 1 to support multiple biometrics (and in fact, multiple algorithms and devices for the same biometric). The power of a multi-biometric platform (MBP) makes this possible.
4. Iris as a tier 1 biometric. Following on from my previous point, the two most commonly collected biometrics are fingerprint and face. In India (as with Mexico), iris will be a primary biometric ranking equally with finger and face in terms of importance.
5. Discerning customers with a focus on price and performance. The team at UIDAI has studied the industry well; they understand the capabilities of the various providers – both strengths and weaknesses. They have structured a system that drives a new price point for biometric algorithms and implements a continuously competitive and innovative deployment with multiple providers. 

We, as a biometrics industry, must continue to adapt to our customers needs and keep pace with the rapidly evolving landscape of technical capabilities and human expectations.

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