The researchers attribute this to a few major factors. One is large-scale government initiatives; the government is seeking to digitize driver’s licenses and has initiated the National ID project Aadhaar to be administered by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which will seek secure means by which to store and protect citizens’ identity data. They also want to install face recognition technology at major railway and metro stations.
The desire for this kind of security partly stems from an increasingly unstable situation at India’s borders, which will likely be exacerbated in the coming years by migration due to climate change. Within India, crime is also apparently a motivating factor behind the desire for biometric security, as luxury residences continue to pop up alongside neighbourhoods mired in abject poverty. On a less dire note, the TechSci report also points to India’s transportation, banking, and hospitality sectors as areas with an increasing appetite for biometric technology in the form of access control, time & attendance tracking, and other such applications.
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October 1, 2014 – by Alex Perala
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