What is square and 150x taller than Mt. Everest?

1.2 BIllion Biometric ID cards. One for every citizen of India.

http://apabritabasu.instablogs.com

This story is #22 in Project Censored 2011

The project will cost an estimated $3.5 billion...that's not bad considering they will be issued to 1.2 billion Indians, providing them with a proof of identity. That means that each card will only cost them about $2.92 to make!

600 million indians will receive a sixteen-digit identity number by 2014 in the first phase of the project.

Aside from the sheer scale of the project, the fact that many Indians possess no existing documentary proof of ID creates a huge problem. Less than 7% of India's population are registered for income tax while voting lists are far from reliable, partly as a result of political corruption.

"The database will be one of the largest that ever gets built,” Guru Malladi, a partner at Ernst & Young who was involved in an earlier pilot scheme, said. “It will have to be impregnable. This large scale database system will be prime target for hackers who steal identities. It contains over 20 different categories of information about the person (none of which is religious).

Currently the people of India have separate cards for all of the categories that apply to them.

independent.co.uk

Uses could be anything from monitoring bank account transactions, cell phone purchases, retina and fingerprint data, to land purchases and movements.

Without proof of Identity the Indians are not able to take advantage of the large government schemes that exist to eliminate or aid poverty. They are treated like temporary migrants. The government has large funds behind these programs that could make a huge difference in their lives.

The Largest Census in the History of Mankind

Why so Censored?

Critics are saying that the project will turn India into a Orwellian police state that will spy on

citizens private lives.

Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer who has written and lobbied against the project says:

"Information about people will be shared with intelligence agencies, banks, and

companies, and we will have no idea how our information is interpreted and used."

Civil liberties campaigners fear the ID card will become a tool of repression.