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Smart Chip: Breaking Into A Smart Mold

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Though smart cards have been around for the past five years, their application has been limited to the cellular market due to its use as SIM cards. Apart from these, smart cards have only been used in loyalty program access cards but not applications which one would consider really hot. However, in 1999 Smart Chip bagged the Gujarat diving license project, the most noteworthy

non-SIM card project to date. The project combines with biometrics–fingerprints–to issue driving licenses. Currently, about 2,000 smart cards are being issued per day and this is likely to double by the end of the year. For a state like Gujarat, it is expected to issue about one million ‘smart’ driving licenses per annum besides converting the existing 6-8 million driving licenses. The importance of the project can be gauged from the fact that so far in the past five years, the industry has managed to push only about 1-1.5 million smart cards while this single project will push more than triple that number. A similar system is being implemented for smart card-based vehicle cards (RC books), which will cover about four million existing vehicles in Gujarat. Following Gujarat, a lot of other state governments have evinced interest in similar projects. This section will see a lot of action in the next one year.

The successful use of smart cards for driving licenses with biometrics will help to establish the viability for large scale government applications like ration cards and the income department’s PAN initiative. Other

applications would include the telecom sector with its pre-paid telephone cards, in the finance sector as debit and cash cards, health and insurance sector, transportation, and also in ecommerce and internet for identification.

If one considers the annual offtake of an estimated one billion cards relative to the total smart cards industry of about 1-1.5 million in the country, one cannot undermine the potential of the industry. With a mission to become India’s most admired smart card-based system integration company, Smart Chip has already laid the foundation stone with the Gujarat driving project and has an early entrant advantage. Smart Chip is all set to make waves in the new millennium. 

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