Fast Start for World's Biggest Biometrics ID Project

Identity is easy to take for granted. Most of us have multiple legal documents or ID cards that prove we are who we say we are. But for many of the world's poorest citizens, the lack of legal identity is a barrier to participating in commerce and receiving services.
In India, an estimated 500 million people have no form of reliable identification. It's a problem the Indian government has set out to fix through a five-year project with a budget of US $430 million for this year. Starting six months ago with rural populations, the government has begun to create a biometric database that will eventually contain an unprecedented hundreds of millions of records. "We are talking about 10 times more than anything else that has been done before," says Anil Jain, an IEEE Fellow and distinguished professor at Michigan State University, who is an expert in biometrics.   link