Use of national ID

Photo: Noor Alam / Driknews

It is very unfortunate that the chief election commissioner has recently discouraged the use of national ID number on the plea that it is not hundred percent complete and there are some errors in some of them.
Maintenance of national ID over 70 million people is undoubtedly a continuous process and it will never be hundred percent complete and error free. Even passport system is not hundred percent error free as there are some “throat-cut” ones.
On the other hand, the use of the unique national ID number of any person in the banking system will certainly stop the loan giving to the non-existing project as done in the last decades and it will definitely reduce the prevailing record-high loan default rate in the country which is one of the main causes of our lower economic growth.
In this connection, I would like to make some comments on a few other issues too. In Bangladesh, the past regime's initiatives are frequently and indiscriminately shelved by the next regime that incurs unrecoverable losses. After the liberation of Bangladesh, cricket was discouraged on the plea that it is a Pakistani game. That's why Bangladesh cricket had been in a long pause. However, Bangladesh managed to become a Test playing country in 2000.
The health policy and the ICT initiatives of the Ershad regime in the late 80s were not followed up by the next governments. So, the “Health for All” by the year 2000 slogan went in vain.
In the early 90s, the chief election commissioner, Justice Abdur Rouf, initiated a pilot Database Voter List Project in a union in Mymensingh. But it had also met the same fate because his successors failed to continue the project and it took over one and a half decades to get our country an electronic voter and national database.
So, I think, to accept the continuity of the good thing, to move ahead for the good governance and to join the digital/ information era with the globe, our country must use national ID number in every possible area. It is also high time to go for electronic birth registration database for the nation to lay the foundation of information driven modern Bangladesh.