nadia ayub May 13, 2004

Tags: technology , policy , pakistan

Pakistan's New Computerised National Identity Card

href="/tag/Pakistan">Pakistan, if one has to stand in lines.” But for a new project like Nadra, these are only the teething issues while the long term benefits and advantages of having a “singular” database far surpasses these complaints.

Then there have been complaints that getting forms attested is a hassle; attestation of forms is a government requirement which unfortunately Nadra is forced to follow. But the good news concerning Nadra is that with Nadra’s swipe ability built-into the card, the card holder will be freed from further attestation. For example any bank or institution that uses Nadra’s dynamic card swiping facility, ‘Verisys’ (State Bank being one such institution) will not have to have his or her papers attested ‘ever’ in the future.

The logic is simple once Nadra has an individual’s data, there is no need to attest or confirm a person’s identity through any other means; just swipe the card, data from Nadra’s data warehouse is transferred in a matter of seconds and Abracadabra the job is done.

A good example would be the new upcoming passports that are going to go into production by sometime this year; no attestation of forms will be required, just swipe the card and go home. No need to interact with any bureaucrat or any of their factotums. Yes as far as lines are concerned, one will have to stand in line to get a passport made or get any other thing done, in any part of the civilized world but reducing long lines is not the job of NADRA but of the population Ministry, perhaps the Population Ministry could come up with a dynamic magic wand plan to reduce the population of this country, so that people could get their Nadra ID cards made sooner.

Yes agreed that one time attestation is also a problem but this attestation is saving the individual from multiple attestations down the road. And it is not only attestation but forgery, impersonation and many other crimes that are checked this way; nobody else can now use anybody else’s ID card.

The other advantage of this credit-card style swiping is that it leads to ‘poverty alleviation’. Now I know the word ‘poverty alleviation’ sounds prosaic and official as every government organization uses it and the incredulity is justified as I represent the organization. But for the young workers in Nadra with many of us with degrees from Universities abroad and having left greener pastures abroad to serve our country, the logic is simple: in rural agrarian communities where there is a high percentage of illiteracy; when a person applies for a loan for seed, chemicals etc or wants to buy a tractor or land; he or she doesn’t need to fill any forms and no one else can use his identity to commit fraud; all one needs is the ID card, which is swiped once and That’s it!

The other great advantage is that Nadra is a singular database system; it was editorialized in a recent Washington Post publication some of the problems America is facing with a multi database system. The American authorities apprehended a serial killer at the Mexican border and let him go scot-free because the immigration database and the FBI databases didn’t ‘talk to each other’, “Both the FBI and what is now the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security have long recognized the need to make these two databases interoperable. Yet that has not happened. The immigration database identifies border crossers for Border Patrol officers, and it has some criminal information too. But without access to the FBI’s system, which links people’s full criminal histories to their fingerprints, agents can’t know quickly whether they have detained a convicted felon. The problem is huge. Starting in 2001, the report says, the INS added to its database a subset of material from the FBI’s system: 152,000 pending "wants and warrants."

To cut a long, sleep-yawning story short, Nadra does not face any of the problems or challenges that western databases are facing because we have a singular database and the system is fully integrated, which means, “Everything talks to each other.”

But it must be kept in mind that whatever the short term or long term advantages of having a dynamic National ID card is, they would all be useless, as long as the old ID card remains valid.