The Social Welfare Department in the Indian city of Kolar is planning to bring biometric authentication to its student hostels.
It’s a move aimed primarily at cutting down fraud, responding to recent reports that hostels had inflated their residents’ food needs in order to receive extra subsidies from the government. As such, the hostels have been ordered to deploy biometric authentication in their dining halls in order to ensure that they can only charge public subsidies based on students’ actual use of the facilities. The move should also help to ensure that non-students can’t take advantage of the hostels.
No specific modalities have yet been determined for the biometric system, but according to The Hindu, it’s going to see a phased implementation in the district’s 105 hostels, which serve almost 4800 students.
Nor is it yet clear whether the biometric system will be linked to Aadhaar, the country’s biometric national citizen registry. But it won’t be surprise if it is—Aadhaar was implemented in large measure to improve transparency and reduce the kind of corruption that is at issue in the Kolar hostels, and has increasingly been linked to a range of important services in the country, with a major banking initiative recently announced. If implemented effectively in Kolar’s hostels, it could further illustrate how biometric authentication can be used to save government funds.
Source: The Hindu
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April 19, 2016 – by Alex Perala
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