This is from the Washington Times about the census taking place in India this year:
NEW DELHI | India began a yearlong census of its billion-plus population Thursday in which it plans to photograph and fingerprint every citizen over the age of 15 to create a national database and then issue its first national identity cards.
About 2.5 million census-takers began traveling across more than 630,000 villages and 5,000 cities in an effort to visit every structure serving as a home, from tin shanties to skyscrapers, in what the government calls the world's largest administrative exercise.
For the first time, they will note the availability of toilets, drinking water and electricity, and the type of building materials to create a comprehensive picture of housing in India. They will also take fingerprints and photographs of each person and collect information on Internet, mobile phone and bank account usage.
The census-takers - mostly local government officials or schoolteachers - also plan to include millions of homeless people who sleep on railway platforms, under bridges and in parks.
So far, India has not had a system of national identity cards. The collection of fingerprints and photographs will be linked with another massive exercise launched last year to assign every Indian an identity number.
"It is for the first time in human history that an attempt is being made to identify, count, enumerate and record and eventually issue an identity card to 1.2 billion people," Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.
So India doesn't have a problem with having a national data base of fingerprints and photographs. Just try that in the US. People would complain that their privacy was being invaded. But having a foolproof system of identification for all its citizens could be a priceless investment. It would lead to rapid identification of all criminals who left fingerprints at a crime scene or who could be identified from a photo. Crime solving would be greatly simplified.
Issuance of a national ID card would simplify mountains of paperwork involved when there are myriad ways of identifying people. All in all a very rational way to do things. But just try it in the antiquated US where the only ID system is state drivers' licenses. Although everyone has a social security number, there is no national ID card let alone a national fingerprint and photo database. India far surpasses the US in this rational way of doing things. And it sounds like they are doing a more thorough job of counting every citizen and not just relying on citizens to return census forms which many in the US are not doing.
