A number that’s unique to you, your photograph, your fingerprint. All will be rolled into a smart card to give you your identity wherever you are in India. That’s what an elaborate exercise, undertaken by the Registrar General of India, promises to roll out March onward in a pilot project to cover 18 lakh-plus people above the age of 18 in 12 states and a Union Territory.

In the works since 2003 — it was the brainchild of the then Union Home Minister L K Advani — the project gathered momentum in 2005 and has now reached a stage where a supervising agency is being short-listed to prepare smart cards and distribute them to 18 lakh-plus “Indians” whose identity has been officially established.

The progress of the pilot project was reviewed at a meeting convened by the Union Home Ministry last week. The cards will have the name, date of birth, place of birth, parent’s name and the citizen’s photograph and fingerprint. A network of card-reading machines across the country, including several at selected border-entry points, can scan these cards to authenticate identity.

The National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, has designed the cards. At the moment, 19 MNIC centres are scrutinizing citizenship details in areas covered by the pilot project. These centres have nearly finalized the list of “citizens” eligible for the cards. “Over 30 lakh people have been covered in these areas and about 18 lakh-plus have satisfied the norms,” a Home Ministry official said. The rest will have another year to furnish necessary papers to satisfy the rules of citizenship.

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