The
question of verifying a handwritten signature has become the subject of a
national debate in India. Visit
The
question concerns a resignation letter sent by Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, a
candidate for election as President of India, to the Indian Statistical
Institute (ISI) in Kolkata. The resignation is from the post of Chairman, ISI.
Under Indian law, a candidate for the President’s position should not be
holding such a post on the day of nomination. The leading opposition party, BJP,
and another candidate Mr. P A Sangma, have questioned if the signature on the
resignation letter is a genuine one.
On reading
this, my thoughts went back to my blog posting dated Saturday, March 11, 2006,
titled “Is handwriting really accurate in identifying people”? This had appeared in my blog http://www.newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/
Let us go beyond
the signature that has received a lot of media attention now. Ensuring the
verifiability of signatures and their time and date is of great importance to
any economy. We cannot burden courts by having them spend days on end listening
to arguments on such questions.
Handwritten
signatures are no solution to this problem except credible witnesses testify to
the signing and handing over of the document to the recipient. (Of course, you
cannot ask that this procedure should be adopted for resignation letters!) My
blog post mentioned above discussed the unreliability of handwriting
recognition. It quoted a judgment of the US Supreme Court which referred to a paper
authored by an expert, which gives the results of a study showing experts make
errors in approximately 7% of their judgments and non-experts err approximately
thirty eight percent of the time!
Sophisticated
technology is in use in India by the Income Tax Dept and all banks for online
verification. When a bank pays you interest on a term deposit, it has to meet a
legal requirement – to deduct a specified percentage of the amount due to you
and pay it to the account of the Income Tax Dept, registering the payment with
the National Securities Depository (NSDL) Ltd. NSDL is an information
technology service provider with a specialization in security for online
transactions.
Yesterday I went to my bank to ask for a certificate stating the amount deducted from me and transferred to the Income Tax Dept. The bank officer who handled this request explained to me that they can no longer issue such a certificate themselves. Instead, they have to download the statement form NSDL, which keeps track of all income tax payments registered with it.
Yesterday I went to my bank to ask for a certificate stating the amount deducted from me and transferred to the Income Tax Dept. The bank officer who handled this request explained to me that they can no longer issue such a certificate themselves. Instead, they have to download the statement form NSDL, which keeps track of all income tax payments registered with it.
Technically,
NSDL could introduce in future a system to address the problems of registering
and time-stamping documents. Anyone sending an online communication through
this system to someone else could have the transmission registered online with
NSDL. The sending party would identify himself to NSDL through one or more
passwords or a digital signature. The recipient would be identified by the
email address given to NSDL to forward the communication. All NSDL would need
to do is to send both the sender and recipient a copy of the communication
digitally signed by itself. This would serve as an authentication of the
message to the recipient and as a receipt to the sender. It is a trivial matter
to verify a digital signature with the right software at any time, now or in
the future. NSDL does not need to store the communication for future
verification at all, as the technology verifies the document if either of the
transacting parties produces a machine-readable copy.
I hope that
the current high profile dispute would trigger an implementation of a national
communication registry. It would contribute an improvement to the velocity of business in India, earn its own costs and turn in a handsome profit!
Srinivasan
Ramani
2 comments:
Its true that hand written signatures are hard to verify and is a very time consuming task. These days several other tools and techniques are available to verify the documents communicated online. One of the most promising and effective technique is digital signatures.
digital signature certificate
Digital signatures have their use. However, the fact is that an industry has developed, which makes acquisition of necessary capability and use of digital signatures a time-consuming and expensive ritual. That is why there is very little use of digital signatures by the average computer user. Simpler means of authenticating emails and documents exchanged online do have to be investigated.
Srinivasan Ramani
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