Indian identity card

The historical need for identification, in India has mainly been for the public distribution system for food grains and is called the 'Ration card'. As this was an almost universally used for the procurement of food, everyone had a ration card and this was used for identification. This however only had the names of users written by hand on them and often in many scripts and different spellings and hence has outlived its use for identification today. Voter identity cards have been issued since the mid 1990s in many states and these have initially had black and white digital pictures. More recently they have colour digtal pictures. The PAN card or the Permanent Account Number (PAN) Card , mainly used for income tax purposes (for all those who come into the income tax bracket) is however restriced to a minority of Indians who pay taxes and hence has not been a viable 'identity card' universally. A recent government of India initiative has appointed Nandan Nilekani , a former executive of Infosys India, an Indian IT company of international standing as a chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) which aims to see that all 1.2 billion Indian citizens get biometric Identity cards. This is thought to assure proper distribution of welfare schemes to those who need it and prevent misuse of positive caste discrimination policies of the Government of India.