Every year billions of dollars are lost through credit card fraud theft, phishing scams targeting bank account information, and other forms of ID theft.
While in a “smallish” country like the US with “only” 300 million people its tough enough to even conceptualize a biometric system that can handle a population this large. In India, the massive population of over a billion people is going to be really pushing the envelope under their new ‘Unique Identification Card’ scheme whereby they are planning on establishing the identity of each and every citizen through the use of a smart card containing biometric information for a given individual.
Considering the large scale complexity of such an endeavor selecting a proper modality of biometric identity is a challenge in itself. Lets look at the obvious choice: Fingerprints! Good ol’ reliable fingerprints! Everyone’s got one right? Wrong! It has been noted that due to the rugged physical work for most Indians especially in rural areas, many Indians have their fingerprints physically sanded off over time. This is a known phenomenon and has even been observed in the case of cement/masonry workers in western nations.
Well what about retina recognition? Again you hit a snag where eye diseases are common and poor health care makes this not a good choice either. To a certain extend, even iris can be problematic especially in cases of severe eye diseases or injury.
Fear not… we still have VOICE! You may think that Indians are one of the most chatty and always the ready to speak type and hence voice recognition is possibly another option. This has potential, right? Mayyyybee! 
One thing to keep in mind is that there are almost 800 languages and dialects spoken in the country, so while 1:1 verification is probably doable, any sort of common training set for anything beyond 1:1 can be tricky… even prompting the user for the 1:1 can be a challenge. Just think of it: what language do you present the challenge/response prompt in?
Well… lets see whats left… Face recognition! Maybe… however, many women in the villages cover their face for religious and or modesty reasons and would never lift their veil to strangers.
So, how are Indians going to manage this tremendous challenge to provide biometric identification to their citizens? There is still hope in the traditional Indian ‘Jugaad’ technique, meaning somehow combine things to make them work. So maybe a dynamic combination of modalities (note: we’re *not* talking biometric fusion here) different biometric sensing approaches can be employed dynamically according to physical need or simply to suit different regional and personal requirements. The IT corporate wizard Nandan Nilekeni, former CEO of Infosys, the number one Indian IT czar has been roped in to provide leadership to this project.
Read more about it here:
http://www.india-server.com/news/unique-id-project-to-get-rs-100-crore-8139.html
