NEW DELHI — India began a year-long 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, to create a comprehensive picture of housing in India, they will note the availability of toilets, drinking water and electricity, and the type of building materials.
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 and teachers — also plan to include millions of homeless people who sleep on railway platforms, under bridges and in parks.
“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.
The total cost will reach 57 billion rupees ($1.2 billion), the government said.
