First UIDs to go to coasts

In five years, the Unique Identification Authority of India hopes to distribute unique ID numbers to 600 million adult residents of the country. But the first ones to get them will be the residents of coastal villages. A database of 1.22 crore residents in 3,331 coastal villages in nine states and four Union Territories, will be prepared before the census process is completed. All adults among these will also get a smart card with all their details, before UID numbers are issued to residents in the rest of India.
NPR is an ambitious project to enlist all residents of coastal villages, and was started after the Mumbai terror attacks. Identifying people in coastal villages is the first step of the strategic exercise of building and updating a national population register. The essential difference between census data and the NPR is that while the census data remains confidential, NPR data will be used by the security agencies and other government departments, as per the NPR rules approved by the Union cabinet. Data will be sent to the UIDAI. The authority will issue numbers to all residents in these strategically sensitive areas. Based on this, the Union home ministry will issue smart cards to residents in coastal villages. People in coastal towns and cities will be counted in subsequent phases. In Karnataka, the first phase of preparing the NPR is nearing completion. Officials have counted around seven lakh people in 193 villages in three coastal districts. “Data entry of details is over. The task of taking pictures and fingerprints is over in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, and is nearing completion in Uttara Kannada. It is expected to be completed on April 24,’’ T K Anil Kumar, director, Census operations,said. “A big hitch has been resolved by simplifying the issue of nationality. The nationality of a resident will be recorded as declared. A similar exercise started by the NDA government ran into rough weather because of its insistence on the nationality of the people being counted. However, the NPR has resolved the issue by broadening the database to include residents and not just Indians,’’ said a senior home ministry official. The data includes capturing photographs and recording 10 fingerprints of each resident above the age of 15. The data is digitally recorded on laptops of enumerators, apart from paper records. All residents above 18 years will get smart cards. A proposal to include iris images of all residents to comply with International Iris Recognition Standards, is yet to be approved by the Union cabinet