The Hindu : Front Page : For the cyber age, a digital thumb impression

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 08, 2007
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For the cyber age, a digital thumb impression

Anand Parthasarathy

With biometrics, identification comes a full circle — to the oldest technology

RURAL INROADS: A resident of Doddaballapur in Karnataka accesses savings bank services at the local school with a biometric scan of her thumb.

Bangalore: One of the oldest and simplest forms of personal identification and last resort for those challenged by education — thumb impression — is making a comeback, in a new digital form, as one of the more reliable tools. Only, it sports a fancy new name: biometric technology.

Banks can be expected this year to introduce automated teller machines in many rural areas, with an additional facility:

They will electronically scan the thumb print rather than require a customer to enter a PIN number.

At least half a dozen Indian developers have announced solutions that can be adopted to the standard ATM machines — mostly sourced from global companies NCR, Diebold and Nixdorf — to give them this biometric edge.

For rural applications

One software player has decided to go a little further. Based on lessons learnt during a pilot exercise at Kancheepuram with Indian Bank, Chennai, where kisan card holders were enabled to electronically access their loans, the Bangalore-based Integra Micro Systems has just unveiled its Financial Applications Secure Terminal or iMFAST — a portable platform which can be used in a variety of rural applications including banking, loan management, mobile phone recharging, ration and subsidy disbursement.

The tabletop gadget fuelled by a `Geode' processor chip from AMD, harnesses a contactless smart card using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to identify the owner. It grabs the thumb impression with a biometric scanner and connects to the banking or other system, using friendly voice prompts in the local language. The communication link can be anything: a mobile phone, a telephone landline or an Internet connection.

There is no memory or local storage... the data flows back to the main system. Or in case there is a sudden power failure (the system works off car batteries), the transaction is recorded in another smart card — belonging to the supervisor of the terminal.

``There are 8 million kisan card holders in India and they have been sanctioned credit totalling over Rs 476 billion,'' says Integra's CEO Mahesh Kumar Jain. ``A tool like this will help many of them make judicious use of their loans — right on their doorstep — instead of going through middlemen.'' The iMFAST terminals are now being used in a pilot run by a nationalised bank in Karnataka's Doddaballapur taluk to offer savings bank services in a number of villages, which do not have even one branch.

The technology was showcased a few weeks ago at the CeBIT computer fair in Hanover, Germany, and drew much interest from agencies in Africa.

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