Thaindian News

Bangalore, Jan 20 (IANS) The state-run Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) is racing against time to enroll a whopping 200 million people in the next two months to make its Aadhar numbers the world’s largest biometric identification system, its chief said Friday.

“We will be approaching the 200-million mark by March as we enrolling over a million people daily in several states across the country,” UIDAI chairman Nandan N. Nilekani told reporters here.

The authority has already enrolled about 120 million citizens by this week.

To achieve the ambitious target in a record time, the authority has roped in 95,924 operators and about 20,000 agencies.

“Our database will be bigger than that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US visa entry system, which are currently the largest biometric databases the world over,” UIDAI technology head Srikanth. Nadhamuni said.

According to a study of the database of 84 million conducted by the authority to check fake enrollments, the failure rate was a mere 0.14 percent due to duplication and overlapping.

“Of the total enrollments till date, over 99 percent of them can be uniquely identified by the biometric system and the remaining would be enrolled again by de-duplication and manual inspection,” Nadhamuni said.

The authority is exploring innovative applications for the identification scheme so that a citizen can access his entitlements even after relocating from one place to another either within the state or anywhere in the country.

Playing down the differences between the Planning Commission and the union home ministry over the duplication of collecting biometric data, Nilekani said the issue was before the union cabinet, which would meet soon to resolve them.

The parliamentary standing committee on UIDAI also raised objections to the Aadhaar numbers, fearing that the project would cost the exchequer a fortune and sought a review of the principles on which the project was conceived.