India's Billion User Biometric Odyssey 81
mask.of.sanity writes "A bold new biometric identity system is being deployed across India in a bid to combat rampant welfare fraud. The mammoth system will collect the iris and fingerprint records on a voluntary basis of every one of India's 1.2 billion men, women and children. The Aadhaar project runs three trillion biometric identity matches every day — all on a small data center of commodity blade servers."
Tech details (Score:5, Interesting)
They are able to scan 1M people in one day(!), so it takes over 3 years to scan all 1200M people.
One scan takes about 5 megabytes, so 1200M scans takes 6000 terabytes:
http://searchbusinessintelligence.techtarget.in/feature/Aadhaar-project-data-collection-An-interview-with-Mindtrees-CEO
Architecture details:
http://www.biometrics.org/bc2012/presentations/UIDAI/UID%20BSP%20update%20Kris%20ver%202%201040.pdf
Re:Got mine 2 years ago, why is this news now? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Bid to control welfare fraud"... that is just the cover story, considering that the system is full of intentional loopholes and bugs. The real reason why the ruling congress party wants this, is due to its relying on the muslim vote bank. Muslims vote en masse in India, based on whichever party is promising more benefits to them, but as of yet muslim citizens of India are a minority in the country.
Congress is trying to change this by using this scheme as a backdoor method of providing legitimate identity papers(and thus citienship) to millions of illegal muslim immigrants from neighbouring bangladesh and thus inflating their vote bank. The nearest oppositional rival party BJP has a more pro-hindu stance.