06-09, 09:00–09:50 (EST5EDT), Altispeed (JR Ballroom )
India has the world's largest biometric identification system, Aadhaar, encompassing virtually every resident and every financial transaction. This talk describes the Aadhaar program and how it uses open source software to scale to 1.2 billion people and millions of transactions per day.
80% of the citizens of India, the world's largest republic, fall below the poverty line and are eligible for government support. This support comes in the form of free or reduced-price food, cooking/heating gas, and guaranteed employment. Traditionally, the government support programs have been riff with corruption and fraud. Several years ago, the CEOs of India's largest technology companies came together to figure out how to use technology to solve this and other socioeconomic problems facing India. They developed the Aadhaar program (meaning "Foundation" in Hindi), aiming to succeed where other countries such as the United States and England have failed. They envisioned giving every resident of India an irrefutable identify, based on finger and iris prints. This identity is used today to secure virtually every financial and governmental transaction, eliminating the wide-spread fraud and corruption. To avoid vendor lock-in and product obsolescence, the government body responsible for Aadhaar planning and execution, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) developed an infrastructure of free and open source software (FOSS). Aadhaar has truly become the world’s largest FOSS success story!
This slideshow and presentation describes the Aadhaar program, why it succeeded where other failed, its FOSS infrastructure, and how we enrolled and processed the entire population of India, the second largest country in the world. The presenter was the Chief Architect of one of the three major contractors in the Aadhaar development.
