Finger-printing and crime, border security and airport clearance, automating processes, policing and nabbing suspected felons, a dialogue with Ger Daly could fit right into a spy movie. The Accenture managing director for border management and public safety feels that biometric technology has come a long way from the days when only criminals gave finger prints for police records. In a recent chat with FE?s Chanpreet Khurana, he talks about its potential applications in areas such as airport clearance, e-governance, and how India will drive advances in the technology. Edited excerpts:
You?ve previously said it is physically impossible today to improve border management without turning to technology. Could you elaborate on that?
There is a huge ramp-up in terms of the demands at the borders today. Governments want to be in control of who is coming into the country. So how do you manage the border in a way that makes it easy for people to come in and do business, but screens out or at least identifies cases that need more investigation without putting all your resources into that?
There has to be a move away from the idea that everybody needs to be spoken to by an immigration officer?that process doesn?t scale. It does not make economic sense, but also you get to a point where you have to question if it is as effective as it could be.
So how do biometrics help in this process?
We think about borders in three different ways: overseas, at the border, and in country. If we only deal with the border situation, we don?t have enough information to make good decisions. Very often, what drives really effective border management operations is the back-office immigration processes that the country runs itself combined with overseas operations such as visa processing. What we are seeing in Europe today, for example, is a move towards biometric visas. And the problem you are trying to solve there is it is very hard to confirm that the person who has applied for the visa is who they say they are or, when they arrive at the border, it is the same person you gave the visa to.
How do you mine all of that data you are collecting?
Technology has come a long way in terms of being able to process huge volumes of data and extract value from an investigative point of view. Some of the questions I have been working on with some of the agencies is how many people they need to have stationed at the airport in the immigration area at one time, which are the most problematic countries in terms of illegal immigration into their country, and what can they do overseas to deal with that question?
If you don?t have the information, you don?t know if you are fixing the right problem. What people have started to do with biometric visas is implement them in the most problematic countries. And to do that you first need the analytics information.
What are some of the challenges of implementing the technology?
With biometrics moving from the criminal area to the civil area, there has been a huge change in what is being demanded from the technology. In the criminal days, somebody would pick the prints from the crime scene, submit it to the finger-printing bureau, and they would run a batch job overnight and have the results for you in the morning and that is probably fine. But now, you are at the airport and you need the results right now.
The technology has changed a lot over the last years in terms of its speed and accuracy and high volume, and high volume is a big thing.
What is the scope for biometrics in India?
I will stay away from this only because I think it brings us back into the sphere of the unique identity (UID) project and UID is all about identity and then there is a whole bunch of services you can build around that. We can go back and talk more about this in a month or two, it is just about where we are at the moment with the UID procurement.
If you could cite an example of how the technology could change the way governance is done in India?
It is a general e-governance question. Take, for example, the caste certificate in India. A question now being asked is, can we improve the way documents are created or circulated? The real question I think is do we really need a document? Start from there. Because this document is related to some entitlement. So is there a way of delivering an entitlement without having to produce a piece of paper? Because why is a piece of paper a secure document? It is historical.
Have you found Indian government to be receptive to change so far?
I haven?t seen anything terribly different, and why should there be in terms of accepting technology or not? I am intrigued by the number of initiatives that are running at the moment in India. And what I think is really powerful here is the diversity and the scale of the challenge.
So it is dealing with some of the largest cities in the world on the one hand and some of the most rural populations on the other hand. And then the numbers on a global scale are mind-boggling compared to say West Europe and the US where a lot of these initiatives have been running in the past. And so you see a situation where some programmes here are running trials and pilots that are bigger than some of the largest projects anywhere else. And that is going to drive new advances in technology.
But do you see any of these innovations happening within the country?
Absolutely. When I look at the programmes that are running in the country today?UID, NatGrid (National Intelligence Grid), the security programme, and CCTNS (Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems), those are world-leading programmes in terms of the scale of what they are doing. They are very relevant all over the world, so I think what comes out of those projects will have a major impact on the rest of the world.