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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: "Looking at the pace of generating Aadhaar cards, by January 23, 2012, Aadhaar will carry the largest bio-metric database in the world," said, Ashok Dalwai, deputy director general, head of UIDAI technology centre addressing the media here in Bangalore.
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The new center will help in connecting the back-end operations, front-end operations and generating the Aadhaar cards.
Dalwai added that, UIDAI's approach to solve the problem of unique identification is to go digital and online.
Aadhaar is 12 digit randomly generated number given to all the Indians after providing necessary documents and collecting multiple biometrics such as finger prints and iris.
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"The idea behind the Aadhaar is to create an universal, unique, national 'digital and online identity', not connected to a specific scheme or department, that can be used by several agencies at the centre, state and local levels for service delivery," added Dalwai.
Dalwai reiterated that collecting multiple biometrics is an adaptation of the global best practices for the Indian context. UIDAI has adopted a fusion approach of combining fingerprints and iris that improves accuracy of proving uniqueness significantly.
When asked what are the steps that the UIDAI has taken to avoid de-duplication of Aadhar cards, Dalwai said, "The ABIS (Automatic Biometric Information System) solutions fuse the matching scores of fingerprint and iris during de-duplication and are able to get much higher accuracies."
Citing examples of many technology revolution that has happened in India, Dalwai said, "Magic of technology has bought gigantic changes in India. Best example would be in banking sector and railway reservation centre."
Next: Security of personal information...
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Security of personal information
Emphasizing on the security aspect of the individual personal information captured during the registration process, Srikanth Nadhamuni, head of technology, UIDAI, said, "Security and privacy of data within Aadhaar system has been foundational and is clearly reflected in UIDAI's strategy, design and process throughout the system."
He added that UIDAI has taken several measures to ensure security of resident data, spanning from physical security, access control, network security, stringent audit mechanism, 24x7 monitoring, data partitioning and data encryption.
“Our 2048 bit encryption is perhaps the strongest available encryption and it is not possible to decrypt and extract any information even if enrollment packets are stolen,” added Nadhamuni.
Use of open standards for software development
Highlighting on the architecture and use of software for IT development at UIDAI, Pramod Varma, chief architect at UIDAI said, "The Aadhaar client and server software system are both built using open standards that are proven to scale to trillions of computations and billions of data records."
In essence, the entire system is designed to scale large volume of enrollment and authentication transactions, he added.
He further added, use of "open scale out" architecture instead of traditional "scale out" or "scale up" architecture ensures that low-cost commodity hardware available from multiple vendors (instead of proprietary hardware) can be used and investment on hardware is only made as and when needed.
"Most importantly, use of open Application Programming Interface (API) across the system and use of "open architecture" principle ensures that the entire system is 'vendor neutral'," felt Varma.
After launching the Aadhaar cards on 29th Sep 2010, officials at UIDAI aims to issue Aadhar cards to all the Indian citizens in the next three years.