December 15, 2006	Friday	Ziqa'ad 23, 1427

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PESHAWAR, Dec 14: With a significant number of Afghan refugees in the country still to be registered, the federal government is likely to extend the December 31 deadline for registration.

The National Database Registration Authority (Nadra) has issued the Proof of Registration (PoR) cards to over 700,000 Afghans since the start of the registration process on October 15.

Assisted by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Commissionerate for the Afghan Refugees (CAR), Nadra started issuing PoR cards to Afghan refugees ageing five and above. Only those Afghans who had participated in the census last year are eligible for these cards, valid for three years from the date of issuance.

A senior official told Dawn on Thursday that during the last two months, only 482,790 Afghans had been issued PoR cards in the NWFP, which had the largest refugee population of 1.5 million.

“The province still hosts 900,000 unregistered Afghans, and Nadra will not be able to issue PoR cards to the remaining refugees in the next two weeks,” said Sahibzada Mohammed Anees, Commissioner CAR, NWFP.

"CAR and UNHCR have, therefore, proposed to the federal interior ministry to extend deadline for the issuance of registration cards to the remaining Afghan refugees in the country," he said.

About 59,881 Afghans have been issued PoR cards in Sindh, 147,515 in Balochistan, 6,055 in Azad Kashmir, 11,790 in Punjab and 482,790 in the NWFP in the last two months.

Mr Anees said Nadra would establish six more registration centres in the province, where 19 registration centres and mobile teams were already working. Initially, he added, Nadra had the capacity to register 3,000 to 4,000 individuals daily, which was inadequate.

He said that the authority had now increased its manpower and resources and could register about 20,000 persons per day.

Officials said that Nadra had yet to set up registration centres in various refugee hosting areas of the country.

According to the UNHCR, Pakistan provided shelter to 2.4 million Afghans, 1.5 million of whom are residing in the NWFP alone. Under the UN voluntary repatriation programme, 132,587 Afghans have gone back to their homeland since March last.

Initially, the UNHCR had planned to facilitate 400,000 Afghans to go back to their homeland, but a fragile security situation and lack of shelter inside Afghanistan hampered the repatriation programme, officials said.