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The special thing about the card is that your biomatric information is captured. Though in general use, it will be difficult to verify authenticity of card using your biomateric information but if required, it can be done. I am pretty sure that in future government may make it mandatory to provide aadhar number while opening bank accounts or other such transactions. It will have lot of benifits.

E-Aadhar is a valid substitute for the original card. The website is very clear on the subject.

If daily is too much, then do it weekly. Anyway, you have all those staff at the distribution center who are doing nothing. Counting cards would at most take as much time as issuing them - so you don't need any extra staff.


So what are they doing to make sure people cannot get 2 aadhar cards and why does it take 4+ months to do?


It's not really that difficult.

What will be the benefits? I know it will have a lot of benefits to the Govt - they now have an eager, willing junta all enrolled for a privilege which was only available to convicts and prisoners before and they can now track everyone. But what is really the benefit for you and me? I was managing rather well before the program was conceived.

See: if you have the same staff do both issuance and reconciliation, then you need to address collusion. What is now preventing the staff at the enrollment centre to split the proceeds, and send back a report that "10% of cards were misprinted"? This is not an easy problem to solve. And with several thousand participants (at least two per enrollment centre, and say 10K centres across India), you will end up having some bad eggs. So much cheaper for the UIDAI to do this centrally - they can now schedule hourly reconciliations, multi-level reconciliations (even in the mailroom), surprise checks, third-party audits etc. - all at a fraction of the cost of what it would need if they were to follow your method. I am assuming at some point they have computed a rupee-cost of each spurious Aadhar card in the market, and that cost is quite high (several thousand rupees, I'd imagine). So, in the final assessment I guess the UIDAI figured the opportunity cost of extending the SLA from 2 hours to 4 months (guesses) is totally worth it.

Thats a great idea. UID is just a number assigned for a person of any origin, based on his background & biometrics. Even now, there is no reason why a person can't visit multiple centers & get multiple UID numbers. Is the 4 month delay helping UID dept to find duplicates? I don't think so.

Yes, but that is the whole system is built on the assumption that the bio-metrics yield unique results!
And to my understanding a unique number is to a unique set of biometrics.

So, if the same person goes to two centers, though the enrollment application could be accepted, at the time of issuance/verification it should result in a red flag and get scrutinized.
If it is not so, then the whole UID thing is a sham.

An experience similar to Shankar's - we enrolled in mid March (experience detailed in an earlier post on this thread), downloaded e-Aadhaar in July and received the cards in the mail yesterday Sunday Sep 1.

It wasn't surprising to see our postman on a Sunday since he's very dedicated but the surprising part was that he had only Aadhaar envelopes to deliver. Being a stickler for protocol/process, he handed over the envelopes only after verifying the enrollment receipts (he is a nice person whom we know for almost 15+ years now but he does his job by the rule book :thumbs up).

Most of the folks living on our street received their cards yesterday so maybe the UIDAI folks batch up a set for dispatch to each city once every month ?

Yes, I'm sure they have a process to handle duplicate enrollments (it maybe simple if the same person enrolled twice and the system finds it to be duplicate based on biometrics but can get complex - what if a 'person' submitted different set of proof documents for each enrollment but the biometrics match/duplicate?).
The Aadhaar envelope mentions "You need to enroll only once for Aadhaar. Enrolling again is a waste of your time" :)

From what I know from people who have worked on it, there is a good biometric check done at the backend and such duplicate requests are not given numbers. The check done during capturing of info (when done in a network enabled centre), is not entirely complete and hence another check is done while its uploaded to the central server (after checks are redone). A lot of data is apparently recieved in hard drives and loaded manually. People who are hired to capture information are incentivized based on number of entries collected and not unique entries.

SC to examine PIL on 'voluntary' nature of Aadhaar cards - http://www.indianexpress.com/news/sc...cards/1163656/
The Supreme Court Monday set out to examine the "voluntary" nature of the Aadhaar cards even as various states embarked upon making it compulsory for a range of formalities, including marriage registration, disbursal of salaries and provident fund among other public services.

Duplicate Aadhaar Cards cannot be issued.
If a person approaches for two aadhaar cards the data for residence or anything might differ but iris scan and finger prints are taken while enrollment which cannot differ. Hence, while processing the data for issuance of aadhaar card everything is checked. If there is any overlap of biometrics the number won't be issued.

Biometrics is the key here for individuality of each and every aadhaar card which is verified by finger prints and iris scan.

Yesterday, RBI has also issued a notification wherein they have allowed banks to open accounts for customers using e-KYC using aadhaar card numbers and verification is done by Biometrics.

This is one of the (many; starting with its constitutional validity) problems with Aadhar - the UIDAI has not been very forthcoming on the techniques and protocols they use to avoid type I/II errors in this biometrics part.

The problem is again biometrics. There is a discussion on this topic many pages back. Let me give the instance of Brandon Mayfield, a resident of Washington County, Oregon. After 2004 Madrid train bombings, FBI found the bombing suspect's fingerprint to match with Brandon Mayfield and so he was placed under surveillance. His house had been broken into at least twice, although nothing was stolen. His phones were wiretapped, his house was bugged, and his house was searched several times (with warrant). Finally he was arrested as material witness in connection with the Madrid attacks, and was held for over two weeks.
Mayfield was never charged, and FBI acknowledged serious errors in their investigation. Finally the U.S. government apologised with a $2 million settlement.

Nobody knows the exact false positives (wrong matches), in either fingerprinting or iris technologies. It is just assumed that they are unique. For crime detection it is ok. But in a database of billions? Even if the error rate 1 in a million, that is 1000 in our countries population.

Other problems with biometrics:
1) Human tissue change with time. So iris today may not be same as few years back. A valid UID holder 10 years back might not be recognised today. So every few years, UID must be re enrolled with new biometrics.

2) Scanners cannot distinguish between live & non live tissue. Fingerprints can easily be lifted & placed on the scanner. Except the high end ones, a regular iris scanner can be fooled with a photograph of the eyes.

In all likelihood, given an UID number, a person can be identified. But given a person, detecting his UID number will be challenging. I hope UID is not misused.

(Just imagine if FBI planted an evidence in Brandon Mayfield's house. He would have been doomed for life).

Fooling fingerprint scanners is not difficult at all - i.e. you don't need to be James Bond with all kinds of fancy equipment to do it. It takes 10$ worth of equipment to fool a fingerprint scanner.

Biometrics overall are a silly way to do authentication - if your password is compromised, you can reset your password - is it possible to reset your biometrics?

Imagine the CPU power required to compare a set of fingerprints to to rest of the billion fingerprints to detect a duplicate.

Well, let's say it takes a millisecond for one comparison. And there are 10 fingers.

Total time taken check a duplicate (worst case) = 10 fingers x 1000000000 samples x .001sec = 115 days


Now apply that for every check: N(N+1)/2 times where N is a billion.

:D

I don't think it will work that way, but then again you might be over simplifying things.

I however 100% agree that the system is not scaleable and it will not work when you are trying to find someone.

But if its just a comparison for validating a user its will take just a milliesecond. As you are comparing the sample with just the one stored against this sample's name.