EC body to endorse NID for 16 and above
An Election Commission committee is going to place a recommendation of collecting information of students aged above 16 from their educational institutions to provide them with National Identity (NID) cards.
The committee will also recommend to the EC to acquire details of out-of-school children from union offices in rural areas and the EC designated places in cities, top EC officials said.
This year, information of citizens who were born between January 1, 2005, and January 1, 2006, will be collected from schools, madrasas, other educational institutions and union offices.
They will get NID cards at the age of 16, after completing the biometric process, and gradually be included in the voter list after reaching 18, the officials said.
The committee on NID card, voter list and uses of ICT in election management, led by Brigadier General (retd) Shahadat Hossain Chowdhury, is working on the issue.
"We will place our recommendations before an EC meeting soon," Shahadat told The Daily Star yesterday.
He said that there would be pilot programmes at five educational institutions and the committee was working on detailed modalities of the activities including the issue of finance.
Shahadat made the comments when a section of field-level officials opined that they should go door-to-door to collect information of eligible voters.
They, from an online meeting on September 14, proposed that information should be collected via door-to-door campaigns to keep the Rohingyas away from the voters' list and drop the names of voters who died.
Shahadat said that after the meeting he sat with field-level officials and discussed the matter with them in a training session.
"Rohingyas are not in schools of Bangladesh. There are some other government mechanisms like Office of the Registrar General and Birth and Death Registration that the EC can explore," he said.
He said that they were not proposing going door-to-door due to the Covid-19 situation and they would not get enough information collectors as they would not feel positive about it and many families would not entertain information collectors amid this pandemic.
"Besides, we also have time constraints as our tenure will expire soon and the government is planning to provide Covid-19 vaccines. We had collected information of eligible voters by going door-to-door in 2019 and I believe new EC will update the voter list before the next general elections," Shahadat said.
Usually, the EC gets information from eligible voters by going door-to-door. In 2019, officials received data of people born between January 1, 2001, and January 1, 2004.
NID cards are issued to every Bangladeshi citizen upon turning 18 years old. It is required for multiple essential public services such as obtaining utility connections, getting mobile SIM cards and passports, and opening bank accounts.
On August 23, NID-wing officials at a commission meeting had proposed getting details of people born on or before January 1, 2006, online and through upazila election offices.
It was decided that the committee under Shahadat, which usually observes NID activities, will review the proposal and send their recommendation to the commission.
EC officials said they are not going for online registration, as not all citizens would be able to avail of the service. As all schools keep student records, it would be efficient to collect information from the establishments.
Comments