August 2007, Bangladesh caretaker Government has started a project to collect data of all voter in Bangladesh with picture and fingerprint. Is it a Voter list with pictures project or national identity cards (NID) project? The confusion was started from the beginning. The election commission of Bangladesh claims it as a Voter list with pictures project although Bangladesh Army claims it as a national identity cards project. On a live talkshow on Ekushey_Television (ETV) journalists asked Brig. General (Retd) Shakhawat Hussain, The Chief Election Commissioner of Bangladesh that why Election Commission is thinking of preparing National ID card rather than Voter ID card for which they are dictated by the constitution? The answer was that the Election Commission is primarily working for voter list and Voter ID card but data that is collected by the process could be utilized to produce the national ID card. Virtually they are preparing a database which in future will be taken up by the other ministries or other organizations and will be utilized to serve many other purposes. So a national ID card would be produced as a bi-product of the database preparation for the election. But as far the news from Bangladesh Government, they has not imported any finger print matching servers yet to process biometrics finger prints. Even, Election Commission of Bangladesh has not taken any initiative to purchase this type of servers. Central server has not made yet to store Data collecting from the several areas. Back up servers is not established as well. Now less standard offset papers are used to prepare NID. An Army staff related with this project says that this ID card is being given after the lamination of printed information and picture on the offset paper. Two dimensional (2D) barcode technologies are used in NID though is looks like very feeble. Name, birth date, ID number and finger print of a person are included in this ID card. This information can be collected through using the 2D barcode readers. Two company named Tiger IT and Doha tech have made the software which is used by election commission for NID project is not tasted to work such a big project yet. Is no risky practice to use untested software in this project ? Asked by <a href=”http://www.groundreport.com/arafatul”>Arafatul Islam</a>, One Weekly News Magazine of Bangladesh “Shaptahik 2000”. His full report can be found <a href=”http://www.shaptahik2000.info/issues/2007/year-10/issue_12/pdf/pp20070803.pdf”>here</a>.

Tags: Bangladesh, National ID, Voter List