India has decided to issue identification cards to its population; the process will take years to complete for all of its 120 crore (1.2 billion) people. One of the pieces of biometric data will be obtained through iris scanning.
Capturing data for all of India's 120 crore population, though, is not easy. To streamline the task, the Centre has divided the job of data gathering between UIDAI and the department of Home, with data of about 60 crore people to be captured by both agencies. Since UP has been declared a NPR state, the department of Census operations is solely responsible for data collection and dissemination to UIDAI.
The original Aadhar project kicked off in UP in 2011. Since then, UIDAI has generated 10,096,593 adhaar numbers for the state. Of these, the NPR project, driven by the Census department, which started on January 1, 2013, has transferred data for the issue of 2295 Adhaar numbers.
At present, the department of census operations has roped in three central PSUs to discharge the work of collecting the biometrics - 10 finger prints and iris scan of every adult and child. These three CPSUs, Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), ITI Ltd and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) have, in turn, hired 19 vendors to collect the biometrics from across UP's 71 districts, as recorded in Census 2011.
With this, the data collection process for NPR and Adhaar is under way in 16 districts. This time, instead of having people queue up outside epically organized camps, enumerators in each district will go to every house and issue dates on which a family must visit a neighbourhood camp where their biometrics will be collected.
One wonders if this will enable a Minority Report movie-style iris identification scheme.
Here is a brief clip from the film; note that John Anderton has had an operation performed that replaces his original irises.
(Time for your eye scan, Mr. Anderton)
I wonder if tiny, inexpensive spider robots will swarm through India's teeming cities to look for miscreants ("bad mash") using the iris scan data.
A System To Defeat AI Face Recognition
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.' - Neal Stephenson, 2019.
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A System To Defeat AI Face Recognition
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'