India’s Aadhaar project is one of the world’s most ambitious big data projects - aiming to collect, store and utilize biometric information from a population of over a billion people – so of course there are challenges, but also an incredible opportunity, says MapR, the company behind the technology.
Aadhaar, essentially a 12-digit number issued to individuals by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), was commissioned by the Government of India in 2009. Serving as the grand architect and first chairman of the highly technological project was
Intended as a unique identifier for Indian citizens, the aim of Aadhaar, the word roughly translated as ‘base’ or 'support', is to eliminate the issue of false identities and prevent resulting fraud in financial transactions.
California-headquartered MapR, developer and distributor of the
“Multiple challenges include storage – analytics to make sure the data is accurate, security, and very high-volumes of authentications,” says MapR co-founder and CEO John Schroeder.
With over a billion people to process, Aadhaar requires a technological platform that enables storage as well as acceptance of millions of authentications a day.
Individuals take their number and offer up a fingerprint or iris-scan in order to prove their identity – which is pulled and matched from the database to a headshot photo, which has also been stored. With over a hundred million identity verifications taking place each day, Schroeder says it is important that all of it is processed in real-time - at a speed of approximately 200 milliseconds.
India boasts a large rural population, many of who continue to live in regions not yet connected to the 21st century grid.
“It had to be implemented in a very economical way,” says Schroeder, “enrollment is on inexpensive laptops, the low bandwidth and resilient technology must be able to work with the registrations coming in from areas of low connectivity.”
Spending six and a half years on developing the platform for this kind of challenge, Schroeder points out just how revolutionary it is to be able to accept and store data from the 928 million and growing numbers in the Aadhaar database.
The Aadhaar project though, is currently the tip of the iceberg, says Schroeder, who expects the built-scale and built-ability for real-time processing will skyrocket with increasing numbers joining the system – enabling for different ways of utilizing the technology for authentication processes.
“Aadhaar is a huge leap-frog over the U.S. where social security is just a number,” says Schroeder, “we don’t have the validation and biometric identification to match the person.”
The simple implementation of big-data storage as a starting point means that India has a great opportunity to leap-frog much of the world in its potential ability to use the technology in ways of delivering healthcare, insurance services, perhaps even equipment delivery, says Schroeder.
“The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next wave of big data,” says Schroeder, exemplifying
MapR has also been working with telecom companies in Asia-Pacific, using analytics to enable companies to understand their subscribers.
There’s also been a bit of buzz about an IPO for MapR.
“We’re ahead of the plan in terms of growth rates - we’ll be able to take the company public when we feel like the markets are right,” says Schroeder, “we’ve got the luxury and flexibility to pull the trigger, perhaps in 2016 or 2017.”
