Today, the UAE government announced a plan to start using drones to deliver official or sensitive packages to people as part of an initiative to “upgrade government services”.
According to an article released by Reuters the new plan, which is the first of its kind, will see packages and documents delivered using unmanned aerial drones. In order to protect the deliveries and ensure security, biometric data like fingerprint and retinal scans will be used.
While this system is certainly a novel one, the UAE is not the first country to employ biometrics on a mass government scale. In fact, since 2011 the Indian government has been conducting the largest biometrics program in history, with a view to collecting iris patterns and fingerprints from every one of its 1.2 billion citizens. According to a Business Weekly report, “to date, more than 540 million people have enrolled in the option programme, with one million more joining every day across 36,000 stations operated by 83 agencies”.
The initiative is known as the Unique Identification Authority of India or UIDAI and seeks to issue an identification number to each Indian citizen. While the idea might seem a bit Orwellian, one of the main goals of the initiative is actually to give India’s poor an identity.
This mass government involvement is one of the reasons for the staggering growth that the Biometrics Market in India will see over the next four years, with a projected CAGR of more than 44 percent for 2013-2018 period.
According to TechNavio analysts, both the central and state governments in India are carrying out large-scale biometrics projects, such as the UIDAI and e-Passport projects, with a view to enabling faster verification and identification, increasing border control and security and reducing identity theft.
However, even considering the popularity of biometric technology, the market is still facing a few challenges. Biometric systems can be costly to implement, and there is still strong competition in the market from less expensive non-biometric technology such as swipe cards. Even so, integrated solutions such as biometric smart cards are gaining popularity.
The UIDAI project will see Indian citizens issued with such cards, which offer the advantage of offline authentication and will greatly benefit the scores of people living in remote or rural locations. The initiative will eventually allow many previously-unidentified people to access government benefits and other social systems.
Government adoption of solutions like this has a trickle-down effect that is positively effecting the entire market. Increased use of biometric data by the government is helping create awareness about the technology throughout India. This will likely lead to an increase in the adoption of biometrics by private enterprises across the country, which will be a major factor in market growth through to 2018.
For more information, view our Biometrics Market in India 2014-2018 report.
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