PESHAWAR, Oct 5: The National Database Registration Authority (Nadra) has detected some 78,238 ‘suspected’ application forms for the computerized national identity cards across the country.

About 19,750 forms had been detected in the NWFP, Nadra Regional Director Brig Anwar Khan told Dawn here on Saturday. He said that a large number of forms were found to have been submitted by immigrants including the Afghans and Bengalis, and nationals of some other countries.

Mr Khan said the regional office of Nadra had sent all the suspect cases of the NWFP to different federal investigation agencies. Out of the total, 1,181 cases of the Afghans had been proved bogus while rest of the forms had been blocked by the computer owing to identical information in the forms.

The authorities have reportedly registered cases against 714 Afghans for giving the fake information and also booked 467 Pakistanis who had verified their forms.

Punishment for an Afghan for providing bogus information was six-month jail, Rs50,000 fine and deportation while a Pakistani might be awarded one-year imprisonment and Rs100,000 fine for verifying such detail, he told Dawn. No Arab had applied for the identity cards, he said.

The regional director said Nadra had so far issued 2,478,146 computerised NICs in the NWFP against 4,522,723 application received. The authority had distributed 11,365,750 forms through their 31 officers in the province including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). The NICs to the people aged between 18 to 21 years were being issued on priority so that they could use their right of frenchize in the forthcoming polls, he said.

“Nadra has a target to issue about 8.8 million computerised NICs in the province, and over 50 per cent cards of the target have been issued,” he maintained.

“The Fauji Foundation - contractor for the new computerised cards - is printing 100,000 cards daily,” he said and added that the foundation was sending the NICs in two different envelops to the General Post Office for dispatching them to the people.

“The envelops carrying the computerised NICs of the people aged between 18 to 21 have been marked with green colour to indicate that they should be dispatched on priority,” he said.

Nadra was also issuing manual NICs to enable the people to cast their votes, he said. But for that Nadra received two forms - one for the manual cards and the other for the computerised NICs, he said. “We have cancelled the weekly holiday of our staff to issue maximum NICs before the general elections,” he added.

Mr Khan said Nadra faced problems initially, but with the introduction of the double-data-entry system, the problems had almost been eliminated.

He explained that data of a single form was fed in the computer twice by two different Nadra personnel. If one personnel entered the data wrong, the computer automatically blocked the process of verification and indicated the error to the quality control staff for clearing it.

Nadra had also established a call centre for public in the city from where anybody could get information about the reason of delay in issuance of his computerised NIC, he said.