The Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram, recently launched the first batch of Resident Identity Cards (RIC) under the coastal National Population Register (NPR) project at Porthrapur village in South Andaman district of Andaman & Nicobar Islands in the presence of Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Lt General Bhupender Singh.

The RIC is a smart card having 64 KB micro processor chip. The National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, has finalized the visual layout of the card. It incorporates several physical security features like Guilloché patterns, hot stamped hologram and micro text, etc.

The Government of India had decided to create a National Population Register in the country. As a first step, the NPR project was taken up in coastal areas of 9 maritime states (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal) and 4 UTs (Andaman & Nicobar, Puducherry, Lakshadweep and Daman & Diu) as one of the measures for strengthening the security of the coastline of the country.