More than a billion people will be identified, counted and recorded for the 2011 Indian population census, with TIS’ eFLOW landing a huge deal to capture, extract and process the relevant data.

The Indian statistical office, Office of the Registrar General (ORGI) has selected TIS’s, eFLOW4.5, to be installed in 16 processing centres. A new Web 2.0-based data entry tool means documents can be managed securely from any browser-based environment.

"Based on our investment in TIS’ eFLOW software during the 2001 Census, and our positive experience with the eFLOW solution, the knowledge and experienced gained by ORGI combined with the knowledge and experience gained by TIS in census projects worldwide, we see TIS as the trusted partner for this highly important project," said Dr C. Chandramouli, Registrar General and Census Commissioner.

The scanning solution is expected to be based around Kodak i8XX scanners and more than two million staff will be involved in collecting data. More than 240 million hand-completed forms, one form per Indian family, will be processed over an 18 month period. A total of 1.2 billion pages will be scanned..

India is a vast country, and in order to overcome time and distance bottlenecks, TIS eFLOW Unified Content Platform was installed at 16 processing centres, enabling parallel processing of Census forms, thus expediting the process, and minimizing transportation costs. As much as 7 million forms will be processed per week at peak times.

India is also spending 35 billion rupees ($786 million) to prepare a National Population Register (NPR), which will have photographs and fingerprints of all persons above the age of 15 years. The database platform for this has not yet been selected.