UIDAI report on biometric technology confirms its accuracy and reliability

GANGTOK, 24 Jan: The UIDAI has released a report titled ‘The Role of Biometric Technology in Aadhaar Enrollment’ which confirms that the enrollment system has proven to be reliable, accurate and scalable to meet the nation’s need of providing unique Aadhaar numbers to the entire population, informs a press release.
The report is the outcome of a detailed analysis of the biometric accuracy and performance based on 8.4 crore Aadhaar enrollments.
It has been affirmed that UIDAI’s biometric capability for enrolments is ready to handle high throughput (10 lakh Aadhaars per day), accuracy (99.965% on duplication detection) and scale (database can be of 1.2 billion people). The UIDAI since issuing the first Aadhaar number on 29 Sept 2010 in Tembhali, Maharashtra has issued over 10 crore Aadhaar numbers as of 31 Dec 2011, making it one of the largest biometric systems in the world, the release mentions.
The primary design decisions that have enabled achievement of this high degree of accuracy and scale are: combining both 10 finger prints and 2 iris has greatly improved accuracy of de-duplication; the multi-ABIS solution architecture [three biometric service providers] has contributed to lowering costs, increasing throughput and fine-tuning accuracy; the highly scalable architecture based on open components and commodity hardware has made this ramp-up possible.
On the effectiveness of biometric technology in the Indian context with large number of rural/agricultural workers, the release mentions that the analysis has shown that the ‘Failure to Enroll’ (FTE) rate of the UIDAI Biometric system is at: 0.14%.  This implies that 99.86% of the population can be uniquely identified by the biometric system.
Even the exceptions (0.14%) are checked manually and processed. The False Negative Identification Rate (FNIR) of the UIDAI system is computed to be as low as 0.035%. This implies that 99.965% of all duplicates submitted to the biometric de-duplication system are correctly caught by the system as duplicates.
According to the release, Chairman, UIDAI, Nandan Nilekani said “The UIDAI biometric system is processing over 100 trillion biometric person matches with a high degree of accuracy each day capable of issuing 10 lakh Aadhaars daily. This makes it not only one of the most accurate but soon to be the largest biometric system in the world.”
Director General, UIDAI, RS Sharma said “This certainly gives us a high degree of confidence in executing this project of national importance with scale and accuracy.”