Thailand plans nationwide citizen ID data center

The Thai government has plans to set up a nationwide citizen identification data center to simplify the process of accessing and transferring information between state agencies, thereby lowering costs of connections and speeding up processing times.

The Bangkok Post reported Saturday an agreement was signed between the Provincial Administration Department and the Electronic Government Agency (EGA), which is under the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Ministry.

According to the report, ICT Minister Anudith Nakornthap said the collaboration will improve the government's database efficiency and reduce the cost of connections. The data center will eliminate duplicate connections and redundant systems currently in use to process documents among state agencies, yielding expected yearly cost savings of 500 million baht (US$15.6 million), the report said.

Under the agreement, the ICT Ministry will install a high-speed connection to the department's computer system and provide connection services to other agencies through the Government Information Network intranet. This will help reduce the number of direct connections between agencies, the Bangkok Post said. EGA director Sak Segkhoonthod said in the report the agency received a budget of 1 billion baht (US$31.3 million) to upgrade the connection efficiency of some 2,000 government agencies. It will also spend 30 million baht (US$940,557) to increase computer security, he added.

The director said EGA plans to link up 30 government agencies by 2013 and up to 1,000 agencies within three years.

Sukij Charoenrattanakul, director-general of the Provincial Administration Department, said some 103 government agencies use the Thai citizen database and over 100 million database requests are made on a yearly basis. The Royal Thai Police is the top user, at 24 million transactions, followed by the land transport Department at 14 million, and the revenue department with 13 million, the Bangkok Post reported.