Andhra Govt archiving eye-balls, literally

HYDERABAD, INDIA: The state government of Andhra Pradesh, India is on its way at the 90 million person ID management contract that calls for the consolidation and de-duplication of existing database of 82 million citizen demographic details with iris codes of 56 million citizens.

The value of the base contract is in excess of $six million, and the contract has been given to 4G ID after a stringent technical evaluation process through global competitive bidding.

The company has announced that it has been awarded the contract for the world’s largest iris recognition identity management application and data de-duplication processing.

These people were enrolled in separate regional databases over the last four years. Due to the limitations of the original enrollment application, the databases could not be consolidated, nor could they be checked for fraud resulting from duplicate enrollments. 4G ID will be responsible for performing over 6.26 quadrillion (6,262,668,889,152,840) iris matches in search of duplicate enrollments. In addition, 4G will be employing demographic matching software to search for duplicate enrollments in records where no irises were enrolled. To accomplish this task in sixty days, 4G ID will deploy a farm of blade servers, L-1 Identity Solutions’ SIRIS matching engine with the next generation algorithms by Dr. John Daugman and 4G ID’s Multi-biometric Identity Platform.

In addition to consolidating the existing databases and identifying existing fraud, 4G ID is tasked with creating a web-based online enrollment application to support a unique Citizen ID Program capable of serving every citizen of Andhra Pradesh (90 million citizens). This application will support enrollment, fraud screening, and management reporting. It will also be capable of integration with applications from the Housing Department and the Rural Development Department, among others. This deployment will be the largest unique ID management system in the world. One of the key advantages envisaged as an outcome of the project is that it will result in eliminating identity related fraud and create an efficient and effective delivery mechanism for governments to ensure that the entitlements reach the targeted beneficiaries.

Dr. Sreeni Tripuraneni, CEO, said, “This Unique Citizen ID database can be used as the basis for identifying and authenticating a person for delivering various government services through a single system, rather than all government departments duplicating efforts in creating infrastructure, systems and procedures. This project will set a benchmark not only for other state governments in India but also for many of the developed and developing nations where billions of dollars are spent on various government schemes and services.”

Do you think India can finally match eye-to-eye globally in Unique ID for citizens?