Move to extend project even before smart cards begin reaching citizens

The Election Commission has proposed an extension of the smart national identity (NID) card project even though those multipurpose cards are yet to be distributed.

The EC was supposed to distribute the cards to over 95 million citizens between September 2015 and June 2016 under the Identification System for Enhancing Access to Services (IDEA) project.
 
The production of the smart cards was also scheduled to start last month, but there has been no progress.
 

Project Director Brig Gen Sultanuzzaman Md Saleh Uddin told bdnews24.com on Tuesday that they wanted the project to run until December 2017.

“The expenditure of the project won’t increase if it’s deadline is extended. But the added time will allow us to properly manufacture and distribute the smart cards,” he said.

“We hope the deadline will be extended on logical grounds. The production of smart cards will also begin very soon. We’ll get more time to distribute them.”

If they were to distribute the high quality cards by June next year, they would have to ‘rush, added Saleh Uddin, hinting that would not be help them to finish the project properly.

Saleh Uddin is also the director general of the EC’s National Identity Registration Wing (NIDW).

The EC in January this year struck a deal with a French organisation to manufacture and distribute the smart cards.
 
Officials said the project director had written to the Planning Commission asking for the extension of deadline.
 
After that, the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) of the planning ministry asked it why the extension was sought for and whether funding from the donor agency and project expenses would increase if it was to happen.
 
EC Secretariat Senior Assistant Chief (Planning and Development) Saiful Haque Chowdhury sent their response to the IMED on Thursday.
 
He said they proposed notifying the donor agency first and then extend the deadline without raising the project cost.
 
Saleh Uddin told bdnews24.com the project did not make any progress until 2013 due to legal complications.
 
“But now the project is going ahead without problem. The donor agency has been informed. The start was delayed, but we want to extend the project deadline by one and a half years to finish everything properly,” he added.
 
Election Commissioner Md Shah Nawaz on Aug 4 said they received 10 machines for smart card personalisation.
 
One of them would be installed at the project office at Agargaon and the rest would temporarily be put at prime minister’s relief office, he had said.