After the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), the Central Government has also allowed the Rajasthan Public Service Commission to do Aadhaar based authentication for the identification of candidates. Now Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC) will be able to verify the identity of the candidate through this at various stages of the recruitment process such as written examination, document verification, counseling and interview. In view of the cases of dummy candidates that have come up in the past, Aadhaar biometric verification will prove to be a milestone and extremely helpful in the working system of the Commission.
The Commission Secretary informed that on the request of Rajasthan Public Service Commission, the Personnel Department of the State Government had written in this regard to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India on 8 May 2024. Taking action on this, the Government of India has granted permission for verification through Aadhaar for the purpose of verifying the identity of the candidates under Section 4 of the Aadhaar Act-2016 and Aadhaar Authentication for Good Governance Rules-2020.
This is an important achievement for the Commission. For this, continuous efforts were being made by the officers of the Commission for the last 6 months and the Commission's officers attended the meetings of the concerned ministry and Aadhaar headquarters and highlighted the importance of biometric verification for the processes of the Commission.
Aadhaar card is designed to provide a unique identification number to all Indians so that identity fraud can be curbed. UIDAI provides an online biometric (finger, face, iris) verification facility to verify the identity claim of the Aadhaar cardholder.
Biometric authentication by Aadhaar means the process whereby the 12-digit unique Aadhaar number is submitted to the Central Identities Data Repository for verification of attributes including biometrics.
Through Aadhaar biometrics, the identity of the candidates can be verified reliably and it takes very less time as compared to manually verifying the candidate on the basis of documents. Aadhaar is one of the officially valid documents prescribed by the government and hence it also simplifies the process of paperwork.
It is noteworthy that Rajasthan Public Service Commission has made important changes in the process from application to examination to curb the persons and cheating gangs who violate the sanctity of examinations. These include live photo capture during one-time registration, security thread on the examination admit card, QR code, taking the thumb impression and handwriting of the candidate. Along with this, special processes like fifth option in OMR sheet and board allocation through token in interview are included. With the availability of Aadhaar biometric verification facility, the Commission will now be more empowered and prevention of persons who try to appear in examinations by cheating will be possible at the initial level itself.
The Commission has mobilized the basic resources to conduct the process. Now, in a phased manner, the biometric verification system of the candidates will be started by the Commission.
