Biometrics in NRC exercise will be vital to know about ‘declared no citizens’

The Centre's move of using biometrics in the National Register of Citizen (NRC) update exercise in Assam will be very vital to know about ' to be declared no citizens' identity and their movements across the country. \

On Tuesday last, the Centre said that it is thinking of using biometrics in the NRC update exercise in Assam to prevent influx to neighbouring states.

Attorney General KK Venugopal made a mention about it before the Supreme Court Bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman, which remarked that it is not going into this now, asking the government to first submit the standard operating procedure (SOP). "…at the moment we don't express any opinion. Our silence should not be construed as agreement or consent," Justice Gogoi said.

However, the Attorney General continued and said: "They fear that there might be influx to neighbouring states… that is why we are thinking of using biometrics."

Governments and organizations all around the world are choosing biometric technology to combat identity fraud and security breaches, secure confidential data, reduce costs and to improve overall user experience.

The automated identification or verification of individuals based on their unique physiological or behavioral characteristics such as fingerprints, gait, iris etc. is referred to as biometric authentication. Though the concept of fingerprint biometrics has been in existence for thousands of years, the biometrics first appeared in the 1970s as an automated technology. Biometrics is a very strong authentication mechanism.

Fingerprint recognition looks for the unique patterns of ridges and valleys that are present in an individual's fingerprint. These patterns are unique to every individual and thus help to identify individuals from an entire population. Fingerprints are inherent to individuals and can neither be lost nor stolen which makes it highly accurate and reliable.

Verification and identification are the two ways in which an individual's identity can be determined using biometric technology. Verification confirms that a person is indeed who they claim to be and performs a one-to-one comparison of the individual's fingerprint sample with a stored reference template. Identification, on the other hand, performs a one-to-many comparison to confirm an individual's identity.

The identification process compares the individual's fingerprint sample against all the reference templates stored on file. An individual is positively identified if the individual's fingerprint image matches any of the stored templates.