WB to bankroll EC project
FHM Humayan Kabir: Bangladesh will prepare digital national identification card (NID) for nearly 100 million people and set up a national database of the citizens by 2015, through an investment worth US$200 million.
Officials at the Ministry of Finance Tuesday said the World Bank (WB) will bankroll the project with a loan amounting to $195 million.
The officials at the Election Commission (EC) said they have already undertaken a scheme with the support of the WB to prepare the machine-readable ID cards that would be more reliable and accurate.
“The World Bank completed negotiation with the Election Commission last week. The bank has offered $195 million concessional loan for the NID preparation project,” the WB spokesperson Mehrin A Mahbub told e-News.
“We are hopeful of confirming the assistance within this fiscal, to be ended in June,” she said.
Ms Mahbub also said if the project is implemented, the government’s capacity to identify citizens and track the services they are entitled to receive from the state will be boosted.
Before the last national election in December 2008, the EC prepared NID, targeting the voters, by investing a total of US$78 million (Tk 5.47 billion).
The ID card is used to cast votes in different national and local government elections as well as in some official works.
The present ID cards are considered not that sophisticated, creating room for their forgery by dishonest people, a senior EC official said.
“As incidents of fraudulence and forgery, using the existing ID cards, have become rampant, we have decided to prepare the digital NIDs, to check corruption and ensure accuracy of personal information,” he said.
“Under the proposed project, we will prepare digital ID cards, based on the present voter ID database,” said the official.
The World Bank said the proposed NID preparation scheme is aimed at establishing a secure, accurate and reliable national ID system, to ensure more efficient and transparent delivery of various services.
