Pakistan State institute wins Sri Lanka National ID Card project

Tuesday, 12 November 2013 01:36 -     - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), an independent State institute, has won the Sri Lankan Government’s bid to produce national ID cards for its citizens. The Sri Lankan Government has decided to issue new electronic National Identity Cards (NICs) incorporating fingerprints and biometric data for all citizens. The Sri Lankan Government has invited several international IT firms across the globe to participate in the international competitive bidding process and NADRA has won the bid. The project will involve collection and digitisation of all eligible citizens’ biometric and biographic data and transforming the data into a National Persons Registry. The data obtained from citizens will be scanned and converted into a digital format to be uploaded to the National Persons Registry. The bid is based on three components segregating scanning/digitisation of new ID forms, ID card backend system and data centre and personalisation of ID cards. According to NADRA 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, the Department for Registration of Persons expects to collect re-registration data from the holders of the existing paper-based NICs and transfer the data for digitisation. The department has set duration of nine months for the project and NADRA said it is committed to meet the challenge within the timelines.

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