Indonesia,a country that's basically an archipelago of more than 70,000 islands that has infrastructure issues in electricity and limited bandwidth,is rolling out the world's most ambitious biometrics-based national identity card project for its citizens.
Indonesia is spending$600 million on a project to give 172 million residents a national identity card that will be used for a wide range of purposes,including proving identity for voter registration,passport issuance,tax and financial matters,and much more.This electronic national identity card,called the e-KTP,is a government effort to get millions of citizens to enroll at registration centers where their fingerprint,iris and face are captured as images through biometric equipment and personal information stored as a record associated with each electronic identity card.According to Husni Fahmi,who heads up the e-KTP project in Indonesia,the hope is all will be in place before the next election in 2014.
"It's a national ID and it's unique,"said Fahmi,chief of the sub-directorate population administration,and head of the e-KTP Technical Team in the Ministry of Home Affairs in Indonesia,who gave a keynote presentation about the project ednesday at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa."We're putting out close to 8,000 cards per day.We have 18 machines running 24 hours per day,printing cards and encoding the chips."About 118 million e-KTP records of citizens are now stored in databases.
Started in 2010 by the government,the e-KPT resident identity card(in Indonesian,"Kartu Tanda Penduduk")is seen as a security measure to not only counter problems that erupted in the past around voter-fraud issues,but also to combat terrorism.
"We've had terrorist attacks with attackers holding falsified documents,"Fahmi mentioned in his speech.
The goal is to have eligible residents of Indonesia enrolled and with the e-KPT identity card in their hands by the 2014 election.With technology contracts and processes in place for about two years,it's been a race that involves training 72,000 operators in biometric equipment who work in at least 7,000 locations in a country that has 746 languages used by 1,128 distinct ethnic groups living in the vast island dominion of 77,088 villages.600 supervisors try to span this vast region to make sure things are on track and being done right.
The e-KTP team decided to bring everyone it could into the project."We trained the mayors and heads of the Parliament with standard best practices to manage the progress so they can operate it on their own,"said Fahmi.
