The new technology is claimed to be the ultimate weapon against fraud

Mumbai: It is the return of the angootha chhaap in a new avatar. For decades the symbol of India's teeming illiteracy the angootha chhaap or the thumb impression is now making a come back in the biometric age as the ultimate weapon against fraud.

And leading the Indian charge is once government and now private sector CMC Ltd, in which Tata Consultancy Services has a 51% stake.

CMC Ltd, the only Indian company to own a copyright on this technology, has come up with a bio-metric fingerprint solution for bank ATMs.

Bio-metric solutions are security enhancing software programmes that automate methods of recognising a person based on his or her physiological or behavioural characteristics. Bio-metric applications usually factor in personal features such as fingerprints, face, hand geometry, hand writing, iris, retina, vein and voice.

As of today the fingerprint based applications are tried and trusted, while the other bio-metric solutions are still evolving and being perfected.

"Bio-metric solutions are becoming increasingly affordable and we think that the time is ripe for it to enter civilian use in India," says R Ramanan, managing director and chief executive officer, CMC Ltd.

Ramanan knows what he is talking about. CMC started research work in the area of fingerprinting a good two decades ago in 1985. "We actually pioneered research on this and have successfully developed a full-fledged fingerprint identification system," he says.

The CMC solution, called FACTS (Full-fledged Advanced Automatic Finger print Identification system) has been installed across 300 locations in India, across 17 Indian cities.

Interestingly, CMC has installed the same solution across 113 installations in Mauritius and Tanzania.

In India, FACTS has been installed in crime-related police applications.

According to Ramanan, adopting the fingerprint method of bio-metric over a large cross section of population would be far more cost effective and the concept has been proven over decades as a method for identification and authentication.

"The ATM bio-metric solution that we have conceived is a proof of concept programme for Bank of India and is platform agnostic. It does not matter what the make of the ATM is."

The Rs 750-crore CMC, according to him, was looking at integrating the same solution into the national identification card programme and was in active discussions with the Registrar General of India, which has been given ownership of the project.

TCS has off late been leveraging CMC's expertise in the hardware and networking space and been aggressively bidding for infrastructure and facilities management projects both in India and abroad.

These are now being extended to cover projects related to bio-metrics too and the company hopes to benefit from the muscle of TCS marketing team in the foreign markets.

"These engagements will be both in India and abroad and we have an arm's distance relationship with TCS and this should help us boost our revenues and margins," Ramanan said.

Sanjay K Pillai