Tarana firm on deactivating biometric-unregistered SIM cards on May 1

State Minister for Posts and Telecommunications Tarana Halim is not going to budge from her decision to deactivate unregistered SIM cards on May 1 for a few hours.

She says the future roadmap of the biometric registration will be decided after Saturday, the day the deadline for completing the process expires.

The process of collecting fingerprints for biometric registration of SIM cards was announced last December.

The deadline to finish the exercise was announced as April 30.

The state minister had announced earlier that those who failed to re-register their SIM cards in the biometric process would have their connections suspended temporarily as a warning.

Hinting at her unwillingness to extend the deadline, she said on Thursday, "I have been saying this from the beginning. The process cannot continue indefinitely as doing so would give rise to loopholes in the system."

Replying to a question from a journalist at the Secretariat, she said there would be a meeting with the Election Commission’s NID wing, BTRC and telecoms operators and after the meeting, a clear picture would emerge on the future course of action.

Tarana said over 60 million users of the six service providers have so far applied for re-registration.

Another 10 million had failed to complete the procedure due to problems in fingerprint verification.

"We assume that this 10 million were genuine subscribers and they came to verify. We will think out a separate strategy for them," she said.

On May 1, unregistered SIM cards would be disconnected for three hours.

"We want the message to go that they need to re-register quickly or their SIMs would be permanently blocked."

Speaking about those subscribers who had failed to register their SIM cards due to fingerprint problems, she said in such cases repeated disconnections to serve as warnings would be made.

"If after several such disconnections the SIMs still go unregistered, a time will come when they will be deactivated permanently".

The state minister said the process will not hamper SIM sales and eventually those who will have to discard their unregistered SIMs will have to buy new SIMs that will hit the market.