ISB-Digital identity Research Initiative | 2019
The focus of this study is to examine the fingerprints-based Aadhaar authentication of ration card holders in Andhra Pradesh for the first fortnight of December 2017.
The Aadhar authentication attempts for 3.77 M ration cards were made in Andhra Pradesh’s PDS between 1st and 16th December 2017. Out of these, 94,030 ration cards failed Aadhaar authentication. The highest number of authentication failures occurred in the East Godavari district, with 14,307 authentication failures. The average authentication failure rate for the state (of all active cards) was 2.5%. Failure rates for YSR Kadapa (5.2%) and Vizianagarm (5.1%) were more than twice the state’s average.
Several reasons for failure of biometric-based authentication include biometric mismatch, invalid Aadhaar number, invalid biometric status, and missing biometric data in Central Identity Data Repository (CIDR) etc. Among these, around 92% of the authentication failures were caused due to biometric mismatch, placing it as the leading cause of Aadhaar authentication failure in the state. Interestingly, the study of distribution of failures at the sub-district (mandal) level suggests that the number of authentication failures are not tightly correlated with the number of ration cards.
Biometric mismatch could occur due to number of factors, including improper collection of biometrics during authentication, foreign material on finger or the surface of scanner, low finger image quality etc. The current error reporting mechanism adopted by UIDAI does not clearly specify which of these factors caused biometric mismatch resulting in repetitively failed authentication attempts by the beneficiaries. Improvements in the authentication error reporting mechanism is therefore suggested, so that the resident can know clearly the exact reason for the authentication failure.
Further, given the high prevalence and uniform geographic spread of biometric mismatch, a more detailed study of this cause of failure is required. One possible solution to bring down the number of biometric mismatches could be to make best finger detection (BFD) compulsory for all the eligible beneficiaries. BFD is a methodology of identifying the finger(s) of a resident with the best biometric details, done using BFD Application programming Interface (API) provided by UIDAI.
Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.
Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.
He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.
