The Indian government’s ambitious Aadhaar program continues to roll out, with the Central government set to install biometric attendance-tracking systems in its Delhi offices, according to an Economic Times article by Muntazir Abbas. The Aadhaar project involves citizen identity cards linked to biometric registries.
The attendance-tracking systems will primarily consist of fingerprint scanners – a cost-effective and reliable mode – but will also feature a small amount of more expensive iris-scanning systems in each office. According to the article, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (abbreviated DeitY) has already installed Aadhaar attendance-tracking systems in 54 Delhi-based government offices, but the overall rollout is not going as quickly as was initially hoped, with a DeitY official noting that the government “had earlier planned to implement this system in Delhi by Jan 26, 2015, but the project is likely to take some more time.”
The Aadhaar project is perhaps the most ambitious government biometrics project in the world, and is aimed to serve a few key purposes. One is transparency on the part of the government, as we see here; but the program is also being used to fight corruption in the delivery of government subsidies, and to facilitate ease-of-access for citizens with respect to government services.
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Janaury 15, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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