India's face authentication transactions hit all-time high in May

Transactions for service delivery using Aadhaar-based face authentication touched an all-time high of 10.6 million in May, said a statement issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (IT) on Thursday.

The system of Aadhaar (a unique identification number for each Indian)-based face authentication transactions was launched in October 2021.

May was the second consecutive month to register more than 10 million face authentication transactions, with an increase of 38 percent compared with such transactions reported in January 2023, added the statement.

Developed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)-based face authentication solution was being used by as many as 47 entities, including state government departments, federal ministries and some banks.

It is used for registering beneficiaries under various federal government schemes, and for generating digital life certificates at home by pensioners. It is also used for marking staff attendance at several government departments and for opening bank accounts.

According to the statement, face authentication provide features like ease of usage, faster authentication and it is preferred as an additional modality to strengthen the authentication success rate along with fingerprint and One Time Password (OTP) authentications.

It captures live images for authentication, which is safe against any video replay attacks and static photo authentication attempts by anti-social elements.

Face authentication is also working as a robust alternative and helping senior citizens and all those who have issues with the quality of their fingerprints due to reasons including manual work or health issues, it added.