NEC Corporation India - Best Identity & Access Security Solution

Company: NEC Corporation India Pvt. Ltd.
Company Description: NEC is a global leader in the integration of IT and network technologies with a legacy of more than 100 years. The NEC Group globally provides ‘Solutions for Society’ that promotes safety, security, fairness and equality. Under the company's corporate message of ‘Orchestrating a Brighter World’, the group aims to help solve a wide range of challenging issues.
Nomination Category: Product & Service Categories - Business Technology Solutions
Nomination Sub Category: Identity & Access Security Solution

Nomination Title: NEC India Biometric Solutions for National Identification System (Aadhaar)

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NEC India has been providing biometric Services to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) since 2013 for Aadhar the world's first multimodal biometric authentication program.

The project was renewed for another seven years by UIDAI in 2020. NEC India has consistently updated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) over the years and is currently in the process of deploying the latest version for UIDAI. Till now NEC India has served approximately 1.29 billion Indian citizens through the program.

UIDAI was in need of a pan India identity system that would be verifiable and robust enough to eliminate duplicate identities and provide authentication at an immense scale. The Indian Government faced several challenges, including no proof of citizen identity, lack of social well-being mechanism, gaps between government benefits to the underprivileged, improper distribution of loans & subsidies, lack of transparency, etc. Traditionally, many banks and telecoms required reams of paperwork to prevent fraud, such as birth certificates, proof of address, and even documentation about relatives. With Aadhar, identity verification without any supporting documents happens in seconds.

Hence, NEC leveraged its high-precision multimodal biometrics that combines fingerprint, face, and iris recognition technologies to put together a large-scale biometric authentication system that does not involve storage and submission of documents.

The Aadhaar system supported by NEC's Biometric Identification System, provides a de-duplicated unique identity. It only collects minimal data to generate a unique identity and issue the Aadhaar number after biometric de-duplication (demographic deduplication for children below five years of age). It manages the lifecycle changes of that identity record through demographic and biometric updates. In addition, it provides mechanisms for the resident to assert their identity through online authentication and offline verification to avail various services.

Social benefits of Aadhaar:
-Minimize leakage in government subsidy and social welfare expenditure by removing fake and duplicate entries in beneficiary lists
-Enable inclusion and Aadhaar based financial transactions
-Ensure direct delivery of benefits to the bank accounts of the Aadhaar number holders

Technology benefits to the government sector
-Stimulate adoption of technology and help drive e-Governance reengineering projects
-Increase adoption of open source and open architecture in e-Governance projects by demonstrating success within a large-scale implementation.

Reception & critical feedback
A large percentage of the Indian population in the villages is illiterate and lacks basic amenities like toilets or electricity in their homes. Hundreds of millions of Indians lack birth certificates or other reliable documentation of their identity, so Aadhaar is the first form of legitimate ID many possess. A unique 12-digit number matched to citizens' data helps the local authorities scan their fingerprints on readers and seek clearance from Aadhaar. The large migrant population that moves from villages or tier-3 cities to metros every year searching for a livelihood lacks any documents sufficing their existence. So Aadhaar allows them to have a citizen identity to open a bank account or get registered mobile service on the mobile phone without much hassle.Former Indian Finance Minister (late) Arun Jaitley once mentioned in a media statement -- "the country is saving $12.5 billion annually in waste from fraud and bureaucratic errors, many times the $1.6 billion the database cost to build".

Market performance:
NEC has generated sales upwards of INR 100 crores since being involved in the Aadhaar project. The government of India has developed more than 1.29 billion unique Aadhaar numbers, making this the most extensive biometric-enabled identity management program in the world.NEC's biometrics solutions are part of an extensive product suite under the portfolio name, Bio-IDiom. It focuses on increasing security with multimodal biometric authentication. Its successful deployment worldwide caught the attention of the Japan Institute of Design Promotion, named Bio-IDiom as 'Good Design Best 100' in 2018). Furthermore, Bio-IDiom has been highly acclaimed internationally, receiving Germany's iF Design Award in 2019, one of the most important design prizes in the world. To date, NEC has successfully introduced more than 1000 multimodal biometric systems that combine multiple authentication technologies in over 70 countries. NEC's products and solutions are widely deployed for needs such as corporate building entry/exit management, PC login management, and applications in the entertainment industry. NEC's NeoFace series offers reliable authentication using NEC's face recognition technology, evaluated as the world's fastest and most accurate biometric authentication technology.

NEC works closely with The Government of India (GoI) on their vision for the flagship smart cities initiative, which involves various identity & access Security Solutions. The Government relies on NEC's global expertise and ability to customize solutions for the Indian demographic ----- The brand has been recognized as 'World's No.1 Biometric Company' by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) four times in a row. So, it will be safe to say that there is a little bit of NEC in every Indian's pocket. NEC was central in delivering the Aadhar card program.

Relying on NEC's effective products customized for the Indian population, NEC India is the preferred partner of choice for the Indian Government ----- In 2019, NEC created its integrated command and control centre as a core platform that gives access to the brains of the cities by interconnecting the embedded sensors around city surveillance and city management. GoI trusts the ICT leader's technology prowess; therefore, NEC has won multiple identity and access projects across Indian states, --- launch of a biometric center loaded with an automatic fingerprint identification system to track criminal investigations in Karnataka, The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC, an Indianautonomous scientific society, operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), and Kerala Police.