Kanpur, May 4: The Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) is the latest to join the ‘‘smart card’’ bandwagon. All students, faculty members and other staff at IIT-K are being issued smart cards that carry all information about the card-holder, including bank account, medical details, fingerprints and other personal data. Besides, the cards also provide access to offices, labs and safes.

Professor Rajat Moona of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) has designed these smart cards. He said they offer many advantages over other magnetic strip cards, the most important one being ‘‘protection of storage data against unauthorised access and modification’’.

He claimed that plastic ID cards, such as driving licences, bank ATM cards and credit cards are mostly magnetic-strip cards, and ‘‘information on these can be modified easily’’.

He said the technology devised by him was based on SIM cards, in which an electronic chip with microprocessor and memory is embedded in a plastic card. He added that IIT-K would be the first IIT to implement smart card access in massive form.

‘‘For the forthcoming batch in July, even the attendance system, library management system, access control system, e-cash application and other ID applications will be based on smart cards,’’ added Moona.

He assured that information contained in the card was secure, so much so that the medical details could not be accessed by non-medical staff and banking details could not be accessed by non-banking staff.

While the name and department can be read by anybody, other data such as blood group, medical and bank account details can only be read by the appropriate authority.