600 million citizens of India are now enrolled with biometric ID

Biometric pattern recognition is a very active field of scientific and engineering research, whose goal is automatic, reliable, rapid determination of personal identity by analysis, encoding, and matching of discriminative personal characteristics. These technologies thus draw upon the sciences of biology, signal processing, computer vision, sensors, information theory, statistics, pattern recognition, and decision theory. Governments around the world have begun to deploy biometric technologies for purposes ranging from airport security and military applications, to national ID and entitlements distribution. The flagship of all these is the Unique IDentification Authority of India (UIDAI), which in 2010 launched its Aadhaar program to enroll the biometric identifying data such as iris patterns of all 1.2 billion citizens, to enable fairer access to Government benefits and services. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that its purpose is: “To give the poor an identity.” India currently spends about $60 billion annually on social programs, subsidies, and welfare benefits, but more than half of this never actually reaches the poor. According to Srikanth Nadhamuni, who is the director of UIDAI Mission Convergence: “It is siphoned away by corrupt officials and middlemen.” One goal of UIDAI is to provide entitlements directly to each person. But only one in 12 persons has a bank card. Only 4.2% have passports. Hundreds of millions have no official ID, and many have multiple IDs. Some States within India have many more names on their food ration lists than the number of persons who live there. Many subsidized commodities (such as kerosene) flood the black market because bogus benefits cards abound. Widespread fraud prevents fair distribution of entitlements.1 The solution for reliable identification of the entire population is to acquire biometric data (iris patterns, see Figure 1, and fingerprints) of every person, stored centrally, linked to a unique 12-digit ‘Aadhaar’ number issued to them that they use to Figure 1. Complex texture of a darkly pigmented iris when it is imaged in the near-IR band (NIR, 700–900nm).