Maharashtra becomes India’s first state to adopt a digital fingerprint and iris scanning system

Maharashtra has become the India’s first state to adopt a digital fingerprint and iris scanning system – Automated Multi-modal Biometric Identification System (AMBIS) – to aid police investigations. This system will soon be replicated by other state police forces across the country. An AMBIS unit consists of a computer terminal, a camera, and iris, fingerprint, and palm scanners. It also includes a portable system to dust off and capture fingerprints from crime scenes. With the integration of the system with facial recognition from CCTV cameras, AMBIS enables the police to cross-reference and put faces to criminals whose fingerprints have been captured on paper over the decades, apart from solving fresh crimes. This new system has replaced the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which has been used by Indian law enforcement agencies to search finger and palm prints.