Enrolment failure rate minimal

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Friday said the failure to enrol rate of the programme was only 0.14 per cent.

Srikanth Nadhamuni, Head of Technology, UIDAI, said the results were based on a study conducted on a huge sample - 8.4 crore enrolment database.

“As much as 99.86 per cent of the population can be uniquely identified by biometric system and even the remaining 0.14 per cent of the population can be enrolled by demographic de-duplication and manual inspection,” he said, quoting the study.

The Government of India has given a clear mandate to the authority that the failure to enrol rate must be zero.

He further added that the failure negative identification rate, the failure to identify duplicate or fake enrolments, was 0.035 percent. “As much as 99.965 per cent of duplicates are actually correctly identified and only less than few thousand duplicates are found in the 120 crore,” he said, adding that the authority was working to find the means of correctly identifying the other 0.035 pc.

Among those who are rejected for attempting to duplicate, only about 10 per cent are fraudulent, attempting consciously to cheat. “...The others are just trying to get their numbers quickly, as they could be misled by people that enrolling more number of times might help them obtain the Aadhaar number soon,” he said.

The report, ‘Role of Biometric Technology in Aadhaar enrolment’, will be released officially in about a week.

Among other things, the report also deals with False Positive Identification Rate which is at 0.057 per cent. This implies that 99.94 per cent of duplicates returned by the biometric de-duplication system are correctly found. In practical terms, it means that a run rate of 10 lakh enrolments a day, approximately only 570 cases need to be manually reviewed.

Also, scalability of the programme is currently at 10-lakh enrolment per day with an enrolment database of 9.8 crore.