Though the world we live in and interact with is increasingly becoming virtual, much of our identity stems from a physical document. It ranges from a birth certificate and a school/college leaving mark-sheet to a passport.
However, as the recent fake pilot licence scam shows, manufacturing a strand of identity is simple and alarmingly widespread. Since the web has a solution to almost every real-world problem, it was only a matter of time before a universal document authentication service showed up. One such website, Myeasydocs, built by a company incubated at the IIT-Madras Research Park, was launched here on Wednesday.
British Deputy High Commissioner Mike Nithavrianakis said the British embassy was in talks with Myeasydocs on possible tie-ups for processing the authenticity of visa applications. Since the British government processes five-lakh visa applications in India every year, “any system that can verify documents online in a foolproof manner is of interest to governments,” he said.
The embassy in Chennai alone handles 1.4-lakh applications a year. “Just one application has multiple documents to verify. Many cases of fraud are very difficult to detect,” Mr. Nithavrianakis said.
The service works on a simple principle: A user can sign up to the free service on http://www.myeasydocs.com and start uploading scanned copies of records and certificates. It can store more than 80 different types of documents. The e-verify module enables the user to authenticate the documents by the respective issuing authority (verifier). Verifier's ids are issued after a stringent review.
The verification is done just once, but the document owner can share the verified document multiple times. The process can be used by any document issuer, including passport offices, visa-processing offices and government offices, or recipients such as financial institutions and business organisations for procuring documents from customers who wish to submit it online. Every document submission follows an SMS-based push system, tagged by an auto-generated transaction code. The entire chain is end-to-end encrypted.
Those who require authentication pay a fee, which is passed on to the verifiers after a commission is deducted.
The company's CEO Avira Tharakan says that when he earlier worked in a bank, one-lakh credit card applications used to be processed by a bank in a month. “A lot of paper is involved, and verification is a painful process. Since many of the required documents are already digitised in many cases, it makes sense to move everything online. With the UID coming up, about 50-crore applications are going to start coming in. When such volumes are involved, the system is always susceptible to fraud.”
Pointing to Australia's efforts at building a National Document Verification Service, he says it all comes down to how many verifiers can be brought on board.
