NEW DELHI (AP) -- India began a yearlong census of its billion-plus population in which it plans to photograph and fingerprint every citizen over the age of 15 to create a national database and then issue its first national identity cards.

About 2.5 million census-takers began traveling across more than 630,000 villages and 5,000 cities Thursday in an effort to visit every structure serving as a home, from tin shanties to skyscrapers, in what the government calls the world's largest administrative exercise.

For the first time, they will note the availability of toilets, drinking water and electricity, and the type of building materials to create a comprehensive picture of housing in India. They will also take fingerprints and photographs of each person and collect information on Internet, mobile phone and bank account usage.

The census-takers - mostly local government officials or school teachers -also plan to include millions of homeless people who sleep on railway platforms, under bridges and in parks.

So far, India has not had a system of national identity cards. The collection of fingerprints and photographs will be linked with another massive exercise launched last year to assign every Indian an identity number.

"It is for the first time in human history that an attempt is being made to identify, count, enumerate and record and eventually issue an identity card to 1.2 billion people,"Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.

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