Hi-tech, low cost, no thought

Mantralaya has evolved. Its officious portals are sporting some smart gadgets these days. Your identity proof alone is no longer enough. Each visitor is photographed, her index finger scanned and her cell number fed into a computer before she is ushered in.

This is a sea change from two decades ago. All you needed then was to scribble your name in a scruffy muster, fill up a chit and get in. You could use a false name, you could use a two-day-old slip if you got weary of the queues and nobody would really know.

When the government felt the need to screen its visitors, it made some form of identification compulsory. For years since, the visitor slip has had to be presented along with some identity proof. And now, it has taken a technological leap. Or, has it? A chat with officialdom shows that confusion within the government mirrors the confusion at its gates. Biometric scanning is done for the UID scheme and in large private offices or laboratories which have footfalls of a hundred or two. Mantralaya has a daily traffic of around 5,000 people. It has x-ray machines and door frames at every entry point. And, of course, the identification requirement is still in place. What, then, is the point of the new system? The phone number is supposed to help them locate the visitor inside the premises if necessary. When was the last time a babu went looking for a visitor who is usually an uninvited guest?

If the government was planning to use the database for some academic profiling of visitors like urban-rural, my picture or fingerprint would tell them nothing. Anyway, I was told that is not the idea at all. I was also told the new system would speed up my entry the next time. So, I would still have to wait in the queue, but when my turn comes, I tell them my cell number and they trace my fingerprint for me. It would conceivably save me a minute or two.

The time spent on processing my face and finger can be saved the first time itself by simply not doing it in the first place. The queues have only got longer. More importantly, a majority of visitors to Mantralaya are not regulars.

The government has no real reason for this ‘upgrade’ except that it just seemed hi-tech enough to do it. And the fact that a database on 1.5 million people a year can be crammed into one terabyte of memory without pinching the pocket. So, we have a modern screening system because it comes cheap but serves no purpose.

Finger scanning, the oldest technology in biometric sciences, is widely used for access to computer or other highly sensitive networks and by banks. As a means of access control, it works because biometric data cannot be easily hacked. But as a technology in a government office which has new visitors every day and which will not be used for any other purpose whatsoever, it’s quite lost. The new system is being tracked at the highest levels in the home department who say the idea is work in progress. We will take their word for it. By the way, there is no iris scan. Yet.