Thread: National identity cards to be issued to all citizens by 2011

National identity cards to be issued to all citizens by 2011

To keep a tab on terrorists often mixing with common people, the government has initiated war footing measures to ensure availability of multipurpose identity cards to all citizens by 2011.

“The national population register will be ready by 2011 and the multipurpose national identity cards (MNIC) will be issued to all residents in 2011,” Union home minister P Chidambaram said.

The project aims at providing a unique national identity number to each person in the national population register, he said here Monday evening after assuming office.

However, keeping in view the complexities involved in both the process and technology, a pilot project has been under implementation on an experimental basis covering a population of 30.95 lakhs in selected areas in 12 states and one union territory.

“The coastal districts and in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the work has already started,” he said.

The identity card is a smart card having a microprocessor chip. This is a secure card for which recommendation was made by the technical committee constituted by the government having representatives from National Informatics Centre, IIT Kanpur, Bharat Electronics Limited, Indian Telephone Industries Limited, Electronics Corporation of India Limited, Intelligence Bureau and others.

Sources said the implementation of the scheme in the entire country would be based in the light of the experiences gained and lessons learnt from the pilot project.

The identity smart cards are being issued to citizens of 18 years and more under the pilot project.

The decision to implement the pilot project in the coastal areas has been taken keeping in view the aspects relating to enhancement of security in coastal areas following the Mumbai terror attack as the terrorists came using the sea route.

The creation of national population register might usher in the era of register-based census in the country and would help in future to have the estimates of population on a real time basis by combining it with the system of registration of births and deaths in the country.

Expecting the population of the country to reach 1.20 billion by 2011, the government is also taking precaution to identify difficult areas and difficult populations in advance so that no person in any household is left unrecorded and no area is left untouched.

Source: TimesOfIndia

It is a good thought but I expect the same lot of mess that happened with the Voter Id cards.

I support the idea but have some reservations on the implementation.

i m sure ppl wud even find ways to duplicate this.......

Considering our population, it will be a nightmare to authorities.

Its gonna be an absolute failure, and technology wise our governent is very weak kinda illitrate.

And i can't see its purpose when people can land right on ur doorstep with guns. Certainly I don't think the police/army is gonna bother askin them to show up their ID's

it must be done in a very cleaner way, i heard many people from the minorities( we know who) have different cards on their names...
i think the govt. must work again and again to refresh the cards given to the people so that fudge identity cannot be misused against the nation..

it must be done in a very cleaner way, i heard many people from the minorities( we know who) have different cards on their names...
i think the govt. must work again and again to refresh the cards given to the people so that fudge identity cannot be misused against the nation..

its not a new thing.
the project was started during the NDA rule, when LK Advani was the Home Minister. took more than 6 years to reach to this level. GOD only knows when it could be fully completed, if ever.

If there is a chip on the card, does it mean that the Govt is going to know where we are at any given point of time ? Kinda paranoid I know but not impossible.

It is a good initiative if implemented wisely and it might make sense to have cards for kids more than 13 yrs also.

still after having a ration card, passport,pan card... this one seems redundant...

and this clubbing of info can do more hard, it just reduces the work of counterfeiters.... by the looks of Social Security number's misuse.

This is certainly a very good initiative, as all the above posts there will be a lot of mess and problem in issuing the cards.

No doubt about duplicating it, there sure will be some technology arriving soon to duplicate it but it can be detected if there is something like cell phones do, there cannot be 2 sim cards with same numbers. If something is done like that then there is a chance of stopping this duplication, but the drawback of this is very heavy investment and maintenance.
Another thing which can be done is every card given to the citizens should be attached with the finger prints. When somebody comes for verification they just need to carry a small fingerprint scanner built-in machine which has the ability to connect online and check in the database. By doing this we can easily identify the culprit as fingerprint cannot be same of any other person.

^^^ dude, we are still in India, as such government bank's computers crash ever so so often, governments institutes don't have a clue about computers, and our government websites are quite easy hacked.

( I don't hav 2 tell u guys about BSNL :devil

And creating this central database only further deepens our problem in this regard.

Do you know nigerian scamsters are already buying mobile phone no's from co's. I've received about 2-3 of their msg's....

need I say more ???

Absolutely correct.

But as they are doing this, then let them do it in a correct manner. They are doing this to stop the terrorists and as we all know all terrorists who are residing in India are having valid Indian passports , so the only way to stop this duplication is to have fingerprint scanned thats all.

The govt must work for issuing the passport-cum-ration-cum-India voting card to people...

the one who doesnt have this, will not be an India, thats all..

Rather than implementing this Natinal Identity card, we can make this PAN card compulsory to all.

yes Rameshjee

a large part of population is not giving taxes properly...and when it comes to giving taxes they will say we are poor..