Smart cards are commonly used for applications such as ID, loyalty, payment and security. With an earlier project under MCIT, IIT Kanpur and NIC together had been able to establish a standard for the Smart Card operating system called SCOSTA. The SCOSTA standard is compliant to a set of ISO-7816 standards which are open standard for smart card interactions. SCOSTA and its updated version SCSOTA-CL have been used for the purposes of Driving License, Vehicle Registration Certificate, National ID, Electronic Passport etc. in India. It is being projected as a standard for the Indian Smart Card projects including the Rastriya Swastya Bima Yojna , National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme etc.

The goal of SMART CARD READER AND TERMINAL STANDARDS project is to establish continuity with SCOSTA card definitions and to develop reader specifications for the hardware and the OS to support SCOSTA based applications.Thisproject therefore aims as developing an open interface which might be used by the enforcing agencies and others who would like to operate with the SCOSTA and other similar smart cards for developing larger applications.Some of the desirable features in such a reader are the following.

• Seamless integration of various peripherals such as printers, network interface etc.
• Support for multiple smart card reader interfaces including contact and contact-less interfaces and card to card communication and authentication.
• Abstraction of display to support text-only and text an graphics.
• Public key infrastructure to support encryption, decryption and authentication, digital certificates and digital signatures.