Around 25 lakh Central authorities pensioners have availed digital life certificates aided by facial recognition know-how below a particular drive, Union Personnel Minister Jitendra Singh stated on Monday.
A particular drive was performed for 20 days to encourage pensioners to avail the ability.
The Minister asserted at a press convention that “harmless data” had been gathered for the restricted objective of verifying pensioners.
Around 25 lakh certificates had been generated, out of which 2.2 lakh certificates had been enabled by facial authentication.
The certificates are issued inside 60 seconds by logging into an app, and are linked to Aadhar.
When requested by The Hindu concerning the safety of the info pertaining to senior residents, Chief Executive Officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Saurabh Garg stated, “As far as authentication is concerned, it is specified in the Aadhar Act that we can keep the data for six months for verification and cases of disputes. We do not store any data.”
“The data is harmless. It is only meant to ensure that the person to whom the pension is going exists,” Dr. Singh stated.
Mr. Garg stated the facial know-how had been developed in-house in 2021 as a response to points raised throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “There were requests for touchless authentication during COVID-19 as till now only fingerprint and iris scans had been used, which required physical touch with machines. The facial authentication technology was developed indigenously in Bengaluru using Artificial Intelligence. We do seven crore authentications a day but face authentication has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few months. Of the 70 lakh authentications done for the pensioners, 65 lakh were biometric [iris and fingerprint]. This is convenient and can be done at home through a smartphone,” Mr. Garg stated.
Dr. Singh stated submission of Life Certificates is a vital exercise to be carried out by pensioners to make sure continuity of their pension. He stated that within the conventional mode, pensioners needed to current themselves earlier than the Pension Disbursing Authority for bodily submission of certificates, which entailed ready in lengthy queues at banks. “This was found inconvenient for the old, ailing and infirm pensioners and further, there was no mechanism for pensioners to get a status update on their Life Certificates in the records of the Pension Disbursing Authority,” the Minister added.
Secretary, Department of Pension & Pensioners’ Welfare and Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), V. Srinivas, stated that to boost ‘Ease of Living’ for Central Government pensioners, the division has been selling the Digital Life Certificate, that’s, Jeevan Pramaan, extensively. He stated, initially, submission of life certificates utilizing biometrics was commenced and thereafter, the division roped within the 50 registered Pensioners’ Associations in several cities to advertise the digital life certificates.
Source: www.thehindu.com