Govt to allow maximum 20 mobile-phone SIM cards against one NID

The government has decided to restore its rule allowing the mobile-phone users to register up to 20 SIM cards of any operator with biometric details against one National ID card.

Currently, a user can keep up to five SIM cards against one NID.

State Minister for Post and Telecommunication Tarana Halim told bdnews24.com about the decision after a meeting at the Posts and Telecommunications Division on Thursday.

Several issues of the telecoms sector were discussed at the more than three-hour-long meeting attended by Prime Minister's ICT Affairs Adviser Sajeeb Wazed Joy.

State Minister Tarana warned the mobile-phone users against keeping more than 20 SIM cards.

"The users must keep in mind that the BTRC has a central monitoring system for biometric registration. BTRC can specifically find which customer is using how many SIM cards," she said.

"And if someone sells his or her SIM to someone else, it will be found," she added.

The state minister also said they will sit with the law-enforcing agencies shortly to fix the steps against violation of the rule.

"We will also consider an option on asking the users to deactivate their extra SIMs."

Tarana said the customers had been given the option once, but the move was not successful.

"The users neither reply to our texts, nor do they deactivate the extra SIM cards. So we'll have to find a new mechanism," she said.

In July last year, the government decided  to cut down the number of maximum number of mobile-phone SIM cards against one NID from 20 to five.

A top BTRC official said the operators had been instructed to implement the decision in September last year, but there was not much response. The official requested anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media over the issue.

According to the regulators BTRC, the number of mobile-phone users grew over 139.3 million by the end of August this year.