The Hindu : Time to get 'smart' on national ID cards?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Sep 21, 2003

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National

Time to get 'smart' on national ID cards?

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE SEPT. 20. Consider this scenario: An Indian citizen has a `smart' card which contains his name, date of birth, address, blood group and a few other personal details. It also contains the holder's `digital signature'. He or she applies for a passport online, signing the application digitally. The passport office tallies the information in the application with the database of the digital certificate. The police verification is instantaneous and online. The passport is issued in a day or two. It contains another smart card encoding all the information about the holder in a tamper proof format.

An `impossible dream'? Not if plans to create a smart National Citizen's Identity (ID) Card are implemented. Delegates at `SmartCards Expo 2003' — the fifth international conference on Smart Card Technology that concluded in Delhi on Friday — learned that almost all the technology bits and pieces are in place to equip all of India's one billion plus population with National ID cards. `Desi' firms have the know-how to implement the `smart' features that will eliminate the need for two-dozen different ID cards, including voter ID, PAN card, ration card and passport.

Already around 25 million smart cards are in use in India, says S. Swarn, honorary secretary of the Smart Card Forum of India. Smart cards are small pieces of plastic like credit or ATM bank cards — but they incorporate a small chip with a memory. The `smart' part is that the data they hold can be updated or changed with every new transaction. Most of the cards in use are `loyalty' cards issued by fuel companies such as the Bharat Petroleum, the Hindustan Petroleum and the Indian Oil Corporation; automatic fare collection cards of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation; cards issued to employees of Satyam, Infosys and a few other Information Technology companies; the Rajasthan Milk Card Project. But this was slated to grow to 500 million over the next five years, the forum estimates.

Maharashtra, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Nagaland, had already set in motion tender action for smart driving licence and vehicle registration cards. Indeed, Maharashtra had set a September 15 date for introducing optical smart cards for all vehicles registered in the State — but the launch may be delayed because of a public interest litigation alleging special favour to the party awarded the contract.

In July, the Hyderabad-based public sector undertaking ECIL joined hands with the Bangalore-based Central Government unit, Society for Integrated Circuit Technology and Applied Research (SITAR) to create smart card solutions for a National Citizens' ID and other applications. SITAR would design and manufacture the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) and ECIL will integrate the product. The two agencies have also joined in a National Smart Card Consortium of Enterprises (NASCENT) with another Government-run Society for Electronics Transactions and Security (SETS) to provide the necessary security muscle to their products.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is partnering SETS in this venture and brings its own strengths in cryptography and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) — the complex mathematical algorithms that ensure secrecy of transactions. At the Delhi Conference on Tuesday, M. Vidyasagar TCS' executive vice-president (advanced technology) made a strong pitch to include a `digital certificate' — a sort of electronic signature — on the proposed National Citizens' ID Card.

TCS had developed the necessary technology for PKI and no royalty of fees to any third party certifiers would be required.

While the cost to the national exchequer for providing such ID cards free to the needy sector would be considerable — 6.25 crore certificates would cost Rs .1250 crores — it was a feasible proposition if implemented in phases, he felt.

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