April 24, 2002	Wednesday	Safar 10, 1423

KARACHI, April 23: The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) has given an updated electoral list of 66.70 million voters to the Election Commission and has finalized an additional list of approximately 5.2 million voters of 18 to 21 years of age.

“The additional list is being prepared by taking out the minors from the 1998 population census,” Brigadier Saleem Ahmed Moeen (retd) informed Dawn on Tuesday. He said this list needs to be verified on ground.

He claimed that since commencement of the operations in October last year, NADRA had built up “an impressive fairly accurate Address Library covering 56,000 villages and a massive on-line database warehouse of 62 million citizens.”

The Address Library built up by NADRA, he claimed, could identify the population up to Patwar circle and even down to villages in rural areas. In urban areas, the population could be identified up to the census block and tehsil level.

He said NADRA had so far delivered 7.2 million identity cards and about 3.3 million cards were now piled up and could not be delivered. Production of cards, he said, had been suspended for some time now to clear the backlog.

NADRA had entered into an agreement with TCS courier service for delivery of cards. Only 15 per cent cards remained undelivered, hence the piling up of cards, he said.

The post office was beset with its own limitations of infrastructure but it had been carrying out the delivery of cards. The NADRA chairman clarified a report which suggested piling up of over 23,000 rejected cards in Karachi post office . “Out of 371,000 cards delivered in Karachi, only 1,628 cards have been rejected,” he said.

Giving a detailed presentation of NADRA’s achievements so far, he said 14.27 million records had been entered into data warehouse. Since Oct 23 last year, NADRA had produced more than 10.5 million CNI cards.

The NADRA chairman said the loan liability of a consortium of 13 banks, led by Askari Bank, had been brought down considerably to about Rs2.22 billion. The markup rates had also been revised downwards.

With this loan amount and a subsidy of Rs70 on a card to be made available by the government, he hopes to complete the total documentation of 140 million population by early 2004.

“We are working with 100,000 cards production a day capacity,” he informed, saying about 2.6 million cards were being produced every month and the job would hopefully be completed in 27 months from the time of commencement on Oct 23 last year.

Describing his task as “daunting and a challenging one,” Brigadier Saleem (retd) said it aimed to cover 140 million with over 70 million people of over 18 years of age. Literacy rate was only 37.24 per cent, there were cultural problems as many people refused to identify their womenfolk.

NADRA had developed a population documentation based on family tree of every individual in which registration of mother’s name was essential. “We face