ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Chau­dhry Nisar Ali Khan approved on Monday a roadmap for the re-verification of computerised national identity cards (CNICs).

During a briefing by the chairman of National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) here, the minister was informed that a helpline and SMS gateway would be set up to receive reports of suspected CNICs issued to foreigners.

The Nadra chairman said the helpline would have a capacity to handle 10,000 calls per day and the SMS gateway would be capable of receiving 300,000 messages per day from the general public.

The emergency re-verification of CNICs has been launched by Nadra on the directives of the interior minister.

The multi-pronged strategy includes amnesty scheme, engaging the community through helpline, SMS service, reward system, family intrusion detection of data, across-the-board application of fraud detection and citizen profiling.

According to the strategy, Nadra would use Pakistan Tele­communication Autho­rity’s bio-metric SIMs verification data of almost 130 million mobile phone SIM users.

Nadra plans to send messages to the heads of family requesting them to confirm their family tree (members of family). After receiving the text if there is a false addition of any family member the head of the family would text back to Nadra with a ‘No’. On the directives of the interior minister, the message will now be sent to all members of the family.

After receiving any indication of a suspected alien in a family tree through SMS, Nadra would request the family head to come to the nearest Nadra office for re-verification of the family tree.

This would help Nadra identify an alien in a family and would ultimately lead to blocking of the CNIC besides cancellation of passport if any.

The strategy paper highlighted that citizen profiling would be done initially in districts where higher number of fake CNICs were detected by Nadra.

The interior minister has given a two-month amnesty to Nadra employees to voluntarily come forward and declare any false data entry made by them for registration of aliens into Nadra’s database.

Similarly, this scheme has also been extended to foreigners to voluntarily surrender their CNICs obtained from Nadra through illegal means.

The interior minister has also approved a reward scheme for people who would help Nadra in identifying CNICs issued to aliens, either through SMS, calls or by personally reporting at any Nadra’s centre.

The interior minister has given a six-month deadline to Nadra for the re-verification of all CNICs.

Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2016