UIDAI Cancelled Six Lakh Duplicate Aadhaar, ‘Face’ Added For Biometric Verification: MeitY

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has cancelled 598,999 duplicate Aadhaars, said Minister of State in Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Wednesday (July 20).

Replying to a query during the Monsoon Session of the Lok Sabha, Chandrasekhar noted that steps had been taken to address the issue of duplicate Aadhaar generation. The MoS added that ‘face’ has been added as an extra verification feature to Aadhaar to address the duplication, resulting in the cancellation of almost 600K Aadhaars.

Chandrasekhar said, “The demographic matching mechanism has been further strengthened, biometric matching of all new enrollments is ensured and ‘face’ has been included as a new modality (in addition to fingerprint and iris) for de-duplication.”

Facial recognition in Aadhaar is also being used for authenticating pension details. Chandrasekhar added that more than 100K pensioners have been authenticated by face recognition technology as of now.

The technology was also used during the Covid-19 vaccination drive last year. Dr RS Sharma, CEO of the National Health Authority, cited a pilot project in Jharkhand in April 2021, where he claimed the government conducted around 1,000 authentications daily using the tech.

While there are shouts of privacy concerns, it seems that the government will go full steam ahead with facial recognition sooner or later. The accuracy of the technology is still not up to scratch right now, with an error-prone system and a lack of legislation around it.

Chandrasekhar responded to another query around Aadhaar, based on illegal websites promising services related to it. He noted that UIDAI has served notices to the websites.

“UIDAI has served notices to the owners of the websites concerned to restrain themselves from providing such unauthorised services by any means, and also to hosting service providers to block defiant websites with immediate effect,” said Chandrasekhar.

According to MeitY figures, since the start of 2022, it has stopped 11 websites from offering such services. Chandrasekhar said, “These websites do not have rights to enrol a resident and modify biometric information or link the resident’s mobile number in existing Aadhaar.”

The developments come as UIDAI has stepped up its actions to make Aadhaar more secure.

Just days ago, the department announced a programme, under which it will create a panel of 20 of the top white hat hackers to expose any vulnerabilities in its Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR).

Since its launch in 2009, over 1.32 Bn Aadhaar cards have been issued. It represents the single largest personal information data repository in the world, and hence, securing the same is of utmost importance.