By Prabhu Mallikarjunan | ENS - BANGALORE 31st March 2013 08:31 AM
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A man gets his eyes scanned for Aadhar card registration | File Photo
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is coming out with a newer version for data capture which will be managed without paper or any other physical forms. The authority’s move comes in the wake of complaints of issue of fake Aadhaar cards, data theft and frivolous enrolments.
Ashok M R Dalwai, Deputy Director General of UIDAI, said, “We are coming out with a newer version of data capture to plug the loopholes and prevent misuse of hardcopy data.”
When asked about the Aadhaar-related complaints, he said, “No technology is foolproof. As per our records, as many as 0.14 per cent of the cases have the potential to end up in duplication. But we have systems to check this.”
This means 14,000 cards in every one crore enrolments may end up in duplication.
People with missing biometric characteristics like iris and fingerprints, people living on hard manual labour (like construction and mine workers), thus having all of their fingers in extremely poor condition for fingerprint recording, people with severed and burnt fingers, broken hands, people having defects like cataract, young children and very elderly people having undefined
features, soft and wrinkled skin are covered under exception clause.
It was, however, noticed that this provision was misused by some operators to enrol people who are not falling under the exception clause.
Though UIDAI officials claim the data entered into the system is fully encrypted (a process that obfuscates the data which cannot be opened without necessary permissions), they have failed to realise that the hard copies of the data, including bank account details, filled in by many customers are put at risk.
Many customers are not aware that mentioning bank accounts is not mandatory.
The hard copies of the data have to be sent to the Registrar (Government) within 10 days of their receipt at the enrolment centres.
“What is the guarantee that the agency will not capture the data in another system and sell it? It has happened in Hyderabad where a leading enrolment agency’s employee was terminated for fraud,” said Sridhar, a technologist in Bangalore.