Now Reading: Naga man’s eyes forced open as KYC scan fails
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Naga man’s eyes forced open as KYC scan fails
Nagaland minister Temjen Imna Along shared a video on X showing a Naga man's eyes being forced open during a failed iris scan for KYC. The clip, captioned 'Struggle is real', shows…
The Story in Brief
Nagaland minister Temjen Imna Along shared a video on X showing a Naga man's eyes being forced open during a failed iris scan for KYC. The clip, captioned 'Struggle is real', shows a person repeatedly trying to scan the man's eyes on a biometric app while others hold his eyelids open. The BJP MLA used humour to highlight how biometric systems built around standardised facial parameters often fail people with Mongoloid features common in India's northeast. Social media users called for alternative verification methods, with some pointing out that countries like China and Japan may have already solved this issue. Along has previously joked about the stereotype of 'small eyes' to draw attention to the same problem.
The Indian Opinion
The 'struggle is real' video is funny until you realise it points to a lazy assumption: that one-size-fits-all biometric design is good enough for a diverse country like India. Talk of racial bias in code is overblown, the problem is simpler: the app wasn't tested on Mongoloid features before rollout. The real test will come when the government publicly shares data on KYC failure rates by region and ethnic group. Until then, the minister's humour is doing more to fix the problem than the tech department's silence.
Sources (2): indiatoday.in, timesnownews.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the 2 sources linked above.
Updated: this story now draws on 2 sources.
