The Hindu : Kalam seeks digitisation of voters' list

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 25, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Kalam seeks digitisation of voters' list

NEW DELHI, FEB. 24. Weeks ahead of general elections, President A P J Abdul Kalam today sought digitisation of the national voters' list, authentication of voters by biometric identification and tallying it with the census records in order to have a reliable digital voters data bank.

Describing the preparation of a reliable voters'list as ``an important governance activity'', he said each state should have dedicated sites for presentation of data which should be accessible to all voters as well as election officers for verification.

Inaugurating an international conference on digital libraries here, Dr Kalam said ``we should collect the voters list through various mechanisms such as palm tops, desktops connected to internet on-line with biometric authentication and photographs of the voters''.

He said this effort could be the ``forerunner for the multi-purpose identity cards'' proposed by the government for each citizen.

Dr Kalam also suggested digitisation of primary and secondary textbooks to ensure their easy availability by students, digital storage of government files and land records among other things.

The conference, being attended by over 600 delegations from 30 countries, was also addressed by Tourism and Culture Minister Jagmohan who called for the launch of a National Mission on Digital Libraries and linking it with those connected with national heritage and historic monuments and places.

The President said there was also a need to integrate the tele-education (teaching through television) system with the Digital Library so that students could read and refer to the books suggested by the teacher from a distant location through on-line e-learning services.

He said land records have to be digitised and verified with satellite imagery and stored. It needs to be linked with e-governance applications for issue, transfer, conversions and additions and deletions. It should be connected with revenue collection, estate management and municipal records. On the textbook front, Kalam said India had a real wealth of public-funded text books for schools and colleges and organisations like NCERT and National Book Trust should bring them to the Digital Library for access by students through internet or intranet access.

In the next few hundreds years, all paperwork would give way to digitised information, he said stressing that this would be a result of the transformation of an industrialised society to a knowledge-based one. ``The ability to create knowledge infrastructure will be the key to development of a society'', the President said.

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