Out of print

India is a young country and it appears that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is keen to record this fact. Its biometric machines have been reconfigured to scan fingerprints up to 60 per cent coarseness — a feature that didn’t exist in the earlier machines. As a result, many elderly people, who tend to have relatively faint finger marks that get fainter in the cold weather, cannot enroll in the system. Now, this is clearly a chronic problem. Officials manning the scanners told a colleague to send a mail to the UID help desk. Each of these mails would then be used as part of a campaign to get UIDAI to do something about it, the officials said.