By Calvin Biesecker
In what could be the world’s largest biometric identification project, India has selected three companies, Accenture [ACN], L-1 Identity Solutions [ID], and Mahindra Satyam, to compete during the next two years to demonstrate how well each can enroll the country’s citizens in an identity management project aimed at reducing fraud and abuse in a slew of benefit programs.
The hotly contested Aadhaar program–there were at least nine finalists at one time–runs up to two years or until the three Biometric Service Providers enroll 200 million citizens, whichever comes first, to provide them with a 12-digit, unique identification number. The iris and fingerprints of each enrollee will be captured to establish the uniqueness of those individuals.
Each company will build a biometric system that can handle de-duplication and identity verification requests from public and private organizations to prevent fraud. The companies as part of the earlier competition have already demonstrated the technical qualifications of their systems and are in the process of installing them in various data centers for a mid-August start up.
Demanding Competition
“I had never seen a procurement that required us to actually create the system before we were awarded the deal,” Mark Crego, currently Accenture’s biometrics lead and the chief architect of the Department of Homeland Security US-VISIT/IDENT identity management system, told sister publication TR2. It was unusual because “they didn’t want a lot of thought-ware or paperwork upfront,” he adds.
The companies are actually working together now to get the capabilities set up in the Indian data centers. Once the systems are operational, they will be enrolling the same data and the “Aadhaar application will issue messages to the three different Biometric Service Providers” simultaneously, Crego says. Out of this, the customer will “get reliability, because they have three different ways of doing it, they get increased accuracy, because they can compare and contrast results, and they have a fall back plan if anybody fails,” he said.
Crego said that the way the next phase of the competition is being managed is similar to how Accenture ran a competition between Cogent Systems [COGT] and Sagem Morpho to upgrade the US-VISIT fingerprint matching system from two fingerprints to 10.
At the end of the current phase of the competition, the Unique Identification Authority of India will select at least one of the firms to compete for the remaining one billion identities that could be enrolled in the voluntary program.
The Indian government has provided some funding for the hardware being used in Aadhaar. In addition, the government will pay about 60 cents, or 2.75 rupees, per enrollment transaction.
Accenture, which is the systems integrator for its solution, is teamed with Daon, which will provide the biometric search engine, Iris ID for iris matching, and Neurotechnology for fingerprint and facial matching. Accenture’s team also includes India’s MindTree for technology support.
Crego points out that one of Accenture’s strengths as a systems integrator is its use of an open source model that is essentially vendor neutral, allowing it to bring together various suppliers and software providers. The company also has about 50,000 employees in India, he said.
L-1 Chairman and CEO Robert LaPenta said that for his company to be one of the three Biometric Service Providers for Aadhaar puts it into the top tier of biometric providers internationally. He told analysts during the company’s recent second quarter earnings call that L-1 is also well positioned as one of two potential providers in India to market and sell its Mobile Eyes iris cameras and Agile 10-fingerprint slap devices for use in the enrollment process.
L-1 currently has other identity management products ongoing in India, including in Andhra Pradesh for the de-duplication of more than 80 million records of 56 million ration card, pensioner and housing beneficiaries. L-1 said that the program has resulted in millions of duplicate ration cards being found and removed, resulting in savings of over $6 million.
LaPenta also said that contrary to what some of the losing bidders have been saying, the companies in Aadhaar will not lose money on the program. Beyond the per person enrollment fee, over time there will be a need for product, services and training, he said.
L-1, which has positioned itself as a one-stop shop for identity management solutions, will be supplying its Automated Biometric Identification System 7 multimodal biometric software to perform one-to-many searches of new enrollments against those already in the database.
India’s Mahindra is teamed with Sagem Morpho, a premier provider of automated fingerprint identification systems worldwide. Sagem Morpho is a business of France’s Safran Group. The company is also using Iris ID for its iris matching.