Bangladesh to buy e-passports from Germany’s Veridos for Tk 33.4bn

Veridos GmbH has won the job to provide Bangladesh with biometric e-passports for around Tk 33.4 billion.

The German firm will provide passport booklets, 28 million machines to make e-passports, relevant accessories, software, and 10 years of maintenance services.

The Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase cleared the proposal to buy the e-passports from Veridos at a meeting chaired by Finance Minister AMA Muhith on Wednesday.

Bangladesh is buying the products and services from Veridos on a government-to-government basis system for ‘Bangladesh e-passport and formulation of automated border control management project’, Additional Cabinet Secretary Mostafizur told the media.

The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council or ECNEC approved the project with total estimated cost of Tk 46.36 billion on June 21.

Not a decade has passed since Bangladesh introduced MRPs, scrapping hand-written ones.

Officials say the government felt the need for e-passports after noticing a trend of people having more than one copy of passport as there was no database of biometric information like fingerprints or iris images of the MRP holders.

The officials said the biometric information of the citizens will be put in the e-passports using a chip to ensure that no one can hide identity.