LAHORE - The government’s plan to fit hardline clerics with microchip bracelets for tracking their location has sparked concern among religious circles across Punjab.
According to the plan, only hardline clerics placed in the “Fourth Schedule” would be fitted with microchip bracelets. At least 1,000 such devices have already been handed over to the police department, a top official said on Sunday.
The devices have been designed by the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) and one microchip bracelet costs about Rs25,000.
The official familiar with the development further revealed that police force will begin fixing the microchips in the hardliners once the department gets green signal from the quarters concerned. “All arrangements have been made and modalities are finalised.”
Approximately, there are more than 700 clerics of different school of thought who are put under the Fourth Schedule in the province.
“The new policy will be implemented fully irrespective of who is who. This idea will make extremists’ monitoring easy,” a senior police officer said.
“The authorities want to use silicon bracelets as part of a scheme to ensure round-the-clock monitoring of the movement and behaviours of fourth schedulers,” the official said.
The fourth schedule is a section of the Anti-Terror Act (ATA) under which someone suspected of involvement in terrorism is kept under observation; it is mandatory for him to register his attendance with the local police regularly.
“Once the scheme is implemented in the province, the clerics (put under the fourth schedule) will be free from everyday police reporting,” government sources believe. They further said the idea will lessen workload in police stations.
It was reliably learnt that many hardliners either went underground or they fled to other provinces as they came to know the government’s new policy. The police and other government departments are also working on this plan so that it could be implemented in letter and spirit as early as possible. Although the government is ready to implement the scheme at any cost, the religious community will certainly put up resistance.
“Consultation with religious community was essential before introducing new technology that could have privacy implications,” a Lahore-based cleric who is put under the Fourth Schedule commented on the condition of anonymity.
“If it’s just for monitoring of some persons then why the government is investing so much money in it, he questioned. Requesting anonymity a religious leader said he did not want clerics “treated like grocery items or criminals.” He said the religious leaders had not been consulted.
“I don’t like the idea of being scanned,” he added.
The human microchip technology to track someone might be new equipment for Pakistanis but it is being used to regularly track criminals, prisoners, and even schoolchildren in many developed countries.
The decision is part of the National Action Plan (NAP) as the government has been working to eliminate extremism and militancy. The NAP was drafted in the wake of the Peshawar school attack to chalk-out a comprehensive strategy to combat terrorism and extremism.
Various solutions are being presented to address the problem of home-grown insurgency.
One method that is going to be used is that the persons who have committed a low-level crime are placed under house-arrest and monitored with a global positioning system device. Authorities can get information about the persons’ whereabouts all times and if the ankle bracelet is removed or out of contact with the personal tracking unit, the authorities are immediately notified.
The incentive for more states to adopt the use of such devices is to free space in prisons for those who must be kept out of society. But as the prisons become more overcrowded, alternative measures are being sought, with the use of implanting criminals with microchip or radio frequency identification tags, as a means of monitoring offenders such as paedophiles, topping the list.
This method of tracking individuals is also in response to the call for increased security in the country, which has been battling militancy since years.
Technologies designed specifically to track and monitor human beings have been in development for at least two decades. Experts are hopeful that this would be going a long way in the future.
“Consider for a moment where we are right now. For decades Americans rejected the notion that they would submit to being tracked or recorded. Yet, just about every American now carries a mobile phone.
This technology is going to keep spreading, and it is going to become harder and harder to avoid it. And it is easy to imagine what a government could do with this kind of technology. If it wanted to, it could use it to literally track the movements and behaviour of everyone.