UIDAI working with World Bank, UN to take Aadhaar tech overseas

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is working with the World Bank and United Nations to replicate the Aadhaar architecture in other countries, a senior official said on Thursday.

UIDAI CEO Saurabh Garg also said the authority is forming an advisory board for different sectors for enrolments, authentication, customer relationship management, among others.

"We are working with international organisations like the World Bank and the UN system to see how we can help them, number one, a kind of digital international standard keeping in view the experience of Aadhaar.


"More importantly, how the digital architecture, the Aadhaar architecture can be replicated in other countries," Garg said.

He was speaking at a virtual event organised by the Payments Council of India.

Garg further said UIDAI is looking forward to having more partners from India who can help it in taking the Aadhaar technology overseas.

"In the Aadhaar ecosystem we realised we need to partner with others outside the UIDAI internal system. In the past we had people from the industry. We are forming an advisory board for different sectors for enrolments, updates authentication, customer relationship management, website design...," Garg said.

Besides, the UIDAI is working on alternative biometrics apart from fingerprint and iris.

"Apart from the finger, we already have iris but iris is more cumbersome to use and it requires special devices. That's why we are looking at facial authentication with due precaution," he said.

Garg said UIDAI is doing face recognition through registered devices but exploring if users can do it from their own mobile devices.