Aadhaar-based app shows positive results in Andhra

Aadhaar has ensured that correct beneficiaries get their monthly quota of ration in East Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh and has helped the government’s top advisory body, the Planning Commission, to track its employees in Delhi.

Updated on: Jul 30, 2013, 01:43:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Aadhaar has ensured that correct beneficiaries get their monthly quota of ration in East Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh and has helped the government’s top advisory body, the Planning Commission, to track its employees in Delhi.

A mobile sim card or broadband based biometric machine authenticates identity of a person within a second or so without the government authorities having to spend money to maintain huge data bases of the beneficiaries or its employees.

“The biometric identity of a person is authenticated by the system after cross-checking with our data centers in Bangalore or Greater Noida,” a senior Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) official said.

In East Godavari district, the person is required to place his finger on the machine for quick authentication. In Planning Commission’s office at Sansad Marg, the employee feeds in his or her employee code and Aadhaar number while registering. Once that is done, the finger print is more than enough for making biometric attendance.

The official said that biggest advantage of biometric based application is that it reduces the cost of information technology interventions.

“Cost of Aadhaar based biometric attendance would be just five to seven percent of a biometric attendance system where entire employee database has to be maintained by the employer,” the official said. Another advantage is that low cost Aadhaar based attendance system can be installed in offices having a small number of employees.

These are first of the few Aadhaar based application services the UIDAI has launched and the initial reports show that they have worked fine. “We have tested our system for a billion authentications in a day,” the official said.

The UIDAI has already signed authentication service agreements with 26 organisations including private sector firms such as Vodafone and Visa Consolidated. “They would be able to use Aadhaar database of around 400 million people to authenticate their identify for providing any service,” he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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