India’s Ministry of Home Affairs is combining the fingerprint databases from all of its states to build a large scale central biometric database for law enforcement. The newly untitled database will contain almost 2.8 million fingerprint records.
According to a report from the Economic Times, the government is also considering additional biometric modalities to be included in the national database including palm-prints and iris records.
The benefits of having a national biometric registry for law enforcement purposes are well documented. The efficiency provided to law enforcement officers in the field when they are able to identify suspects, match crime scene evidence and potentially ID registered victims goes a long way in speeding up the judicial process. What would normally require a great deal of inter-agency cooperation and time consuming bureaucratic processes can be efficiently circumvented with a central biometric database.
National biometric ID is not a new concept to India, which is home to the most ambitious national ID project in the world: Aadhaar. Rather than aiding law enforcement officials though, Aadhaar enables the doling out of government services including special subsidies for certain members of the population.
Source: Economic Times
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August 17, 2015 – by Peter B. Counter
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