Central Government Big Update: 64 lakh phone connection cancel

The central government has disconnected about 64 lakh unauthorized phone connections in the country within a period of 6 months. Sources said that the government has taken this step with the help of facial recognition.

The Center of Development of Telematics (C-DoT) of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has developed ASTR or Artificial Intelligence and Facial Recognition powered Solution for Telecom SIM Subscriber Verification tool for this. This tool detects if a person has used his photo to buy more than the allowed number of SIM cards.

According to the rules of the Department of Telecom, a person can buy a SIM card only 9 times using his Aadhaar card. Now ASTAR has discovered that a person has not hundreds, but thousands of phone connections in his name.

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During the outbreak of Covid-19, the government and various commercial organizations adopted alternative methods such as facial recognition for contactless systems. Since then this large database has been widely used. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act was passed in August 2023 but has not come into effect yet.

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How does it work:

Face recognition detects the similarity of a person’s facial features in the phone’s registration database. It is used to find out if any person has got a phone connection beyond the allowed number. Database in India is a very complex process. No country in the world has such a large database simultaneously,” said C-DOT CEO Rajkumar Upadhyay. There is also an example of some people registering their SIM by hiding their identity.

The database tries to find similarities in these photos even when a person takes multiple SIMs in disguise. We call it a facial vector. Every person has a unique facial vector. A person’s lips and eyes cannot be hidden,” said Upadhyaya.

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After detecting such cases C-DOT will inform the concerned telecom service providers. After that a notice will be sent to the person and KYC proof will be asked. If proper proof is not provided after 60 days the connection will be deactivated. Officials will take action against stores selling such SIM cards in bulk, Upadhyaya said.

”WhatsApp of those contacted through fraud is also monitored. Usually such connections are taken in bulk to commit cyber crimes and then the SIM cards are deactivated. But these criminals don’t deactivate their WhatsApp profile. So we are deactivating the WhatsApp profiles of such criminals,” explained Upadhyay.