Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12-Digit Revolution

by Shankkar Aiyar

A few months into enrolment, it was discovered that a large number of iris scans were stumbling at the de-duplication stage, that is, when they were matched with existing scans to rule out duplication. The tech team was puzzled. Careful scrutiny of the position of tear ducts and eyelashes revealed that the images had been spun around. It seemed operators were scanning the eyes upside down, leading to the switching of left and right eye images. Sanjay Jain, chief product manager of UIDAI, charged with ensuring end-to-end process and outcomes, recalls this as one of the many challenges. After much thought, the team concluded that the villain was the software that drives the device. ‘The priority,’ says Jain ‘was to first halt the creation of errors. So the tech team wrote a patch for induction into the enrolment package.’ What were they to do with all the flipped scans? There was no question of going back to the field. Also, there was a lag between the enrolment and the arrival of the data at UIDAI for authentication – theoretically other flipped scans could be on the way. Jain says the tech team rolled up their sleeves to innovate in-situ and wrote software to enable flipping the iris scan for authentication.