June 5, 2015 -
Biometrics firm Morpho (Safran) will power this weekend’s Aadhaar Hackathon, providing a biometric sensor to develop biometric authentication applications.
The online hackathon is open to participants across India and will have almost 4,500 attendees in a non-stop coding marathon over June 6th and 7th.
“The Online Aadhaar Hackathon will provide a platform to developers in India to build applications around the Aadhaar architecture,” said Sanjeev Shriya, SVP India at Morpho. “Such applications will not only help the uptake of Aadhaar authentication, but also lead to a faster and smarter delivery of payments and trusted services.”
Morpho explains that Aadhaar APIs including Biometric Authentication, Biometric eKYC, Demographic Authentication, OTP (One-time password) Authentication and OTP eKYC will be revealed to all developers. Both Biometric Authentication and Biometric eKYC require approved biometric sensors for which the participants are free to procure their own UIDAI approved devices. Morpho are making USB-based biometric sensors available with its SDK for Android and Windows at the cost of Rs 3000 ($47 USD). Participants can purchase these online.
All applications will be required to prove the use of the Aadhaar APIs successfully, and will be judged automatically for quality of code and added value of the application. The top five applications in each category will be judged by a team of experts and one winner will be selected from each category on June 8th.
Morpho states it began issuing Aadhaar numbers in August 2010. Today, with more than 800 million identity numbers issued, almost 1 million applications are being processed daily,