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More than 2 lakh verified with Aadhaar-based facial recognition for vaccination, RTI reveals

Since the pilot has now crossed 60,000 facial authentications, will the government stick to its guns and roll it out across India?

“Right now, the beneficiaries at the vaccination centres need to touch fingers at the machine for the biometric authentication. They also need to touch the equipment for iris authentication,” RS Sharma, CEO of the National Health Authority, said in an interview in April revealing details about a 'touchless' vaccination pilot being conducted through facial recognition-based Aadhaar authentications in Jharkhand. Now, roughly seven months later, MediaNama has learnt (through an RTI response) that the pilot has carried out over 2.6 lakh such authentications. "Once we do about 50,000 to 60,000 facial authentications under the pilot, we will roll it out across the country,” Sharma had added in the interview. Shortly after, multiple civil society groups wrote to the NHA raising concerns that facial recognition technology is not accurate in identifying individuals and that linking such untested technology to vaccination could lead to "potentially life-threatening exclusion." The exact number of authentications In its response, the National Health Authority revealed that 2,66,943 'successful' facial authentications had taken place under the Jharkhand pilot as of October 12, 2021. It is not clear if this figure relates to the number of individuals vaccinated as well. What was already known An earlier RTI filed by the Internet Freedom Foundation with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had revealed the following details about the pilot: Data storage and use: Facial recognition is done by authenticating their biometrics against the Aadhaar database. However, the ministry does not store any of this data. Authorised personnel: The Ministry had said that…

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I cover health technology for MediaNama but, really, love all things tech policy. Always willing to chat with a reader! Reach me at anushka@medianama.com

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