ISLAMABAD - The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) has won the Sri Lanka ID Card project. Various international IT firms participated in this international competitive bidding process. The mega project shall involve data collection of all eligible citizens’ biometric, biographic and digitization of the same, thus transforming it into a National Persons Registry . This data will be scanned and converted into digital format to be uploaded to the National Persons Registry. Minister for Interior and Narcotics Control Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan congratulated chairman NADRA and his winning team on this success. “NADRA has made Pakistan proud,” he said.
The Sri Lankan government invited IT firms from across the world to participate in the bid based on three components segregating Scanning/ Digitisation of new ID Forms, ID Card Backend system and Data Centre and Personalization of ID Cards. It was mandatory for international firms to bid in partnership with local firms. NADRA has submitted bids for the first two components through NADRA-Informatics consortium. The consortium has been awarded the Letter of Intent for the first phase of the project by being the lowest bidder.
In the first component, at present, there are approximately 15 million manual paper based identity card holders.
For the re-registration purpose, Department for Registration of Persons expects to collect re-registration data from the existing issued population (i.e. citizens who have been issued with the present paper based National Identity Card). This process covers the manual paper based collection of applicant’s data and subsequent transfer of such data for digitisation in an ambitious and challenging duration of 9 months. NADRA is committed to meet this challenge within the timelines.
Chairman NADRA, Tariq Malik said that this is a landmark achievement which will restore business confidence of foreign governments on NADRA and Pakistan. “It is encouraging to see that customized systems indigenously developed by NADRA are winning international competitive process,” said Tariq Malik.
It is pertinent to mention here that NADRA had recently developed and delivered Nigerian national identity card system that aims at delivering a robust National Identity Management System to assist Government of Nigeria in issuance of Smart ID cards to its citizen. In the current year NADRA implemented Civil Registration System in Sudan in Arabic language.
NADRA’s other international achievements include Machine Readable Passport (MRP) Issuance System for Kenya, Driving Licensing system for Bangladesh, Biometric Refugee Registration System for UNHCR and World Bank’s Poverty Score Card |System. NADRA is among the top 50 system integrators in world ranking, according to Italy-based ID World Congress ratings. “This extraordinary milestone will further improve NADRA’s international ratings,” said Tariq Malik.