THE government’s ‘mandatory’ SIM re-verification drive is no real solution to control­ling terrorism. First introduced by Germany and Switzerland in 2003, the concept of mandatory registration of prepaid SIM cards is now either fully implemented or under serious consideration in over 80 countries.

However, as the Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association recently pointed out, mandatory SIM registration where used “primarily as a tool to counter terrorism and support law-enforcement efforts” provides “no evidence that it leads to a reduction in crime”.

So much so, that governments including those of New Zealand and the Czech Republic have not gone ahead with introducing the model while Mexico rescinded the legislation three years after its unsuccessful implementation in 2009. Even governments such as that of the UK, which had ample impetus for mandating prepaid SIM registration in light of the July 2005 London bombings, concluded that the scheme would not “deliver any significant new benefits” in terms of counterterrorism and would, in fact, further “dilute the effectiveness of current self-registration schemes”.

So why has Pakistan projected SIM re-verification predominantly as a terrorism-control exercise? The government’s stance would have us believe that unless the general public (forcefully) re-verifies all SIMs in its ownership by the April 12 deadline, terrorists will brazenly continue to compromise the nation’s ‘security’. The government would have been well-advised to take off the terrorism glove while implementing SIM re-verification and highlight some of the benefits that a large voluntary data-bank of registered SIMs can provide for the public.

For example, the combination of Pakistan’s substantial mobile tele-density at over 80pc and the large number of the unbanked (some 70pc of the adult population has no access to financial services) provides an ideal driving force supporting the government’s financial inclusion programme. Whilst initial growth in the branchless banking sector is highly significant with the government reporting almost 7.9 billion government-to-person trans­­actions by end 2013, leading authorities such as Nadeem Hussain, CEO of Tameer Bank, recently admitted that one of the greatest hurdles in overcoming financial exclusion is “customer awareness”. Here voluntary, rather than mandatory, SIM registration is a very viable method to bring together national identity registration and access to branchless banking products and bridge the customer awareness gap while creating a high volume registered SIMs database.

SIM verification should be voluntary, not mandatory.

In terms of volume, the government can certainly claim by the deadline that over 74 million SIMs have been re-verified in collaboration with Nadra and the mobile network operators (MNOs). The government, however, will have failed to see that the general public would have been more willing to re-verify their SIMs through a voluntary registration and customer awareness scheme in order to access services such as branchless banking, m-commerce and e-government services that they see as being valuable and perhaps indispensable.

Voluntary registration-based policies in other countries have proven to result in a high volume of registered SIMs which have shown trust, ease of use and an overall positive impact in areas such as m-voting in Egypt, smartphone-led identity verification in the UAE as well as competitive mobile money schemes in Sri Lanka. Significantly, none of the aforementioned benefits are dependent on government-mandated registration.

While the role that Nadra is playing in providing the backbone for the creation and maintenance of a high volume national identity record system should be applauded, mandatory SIM registration and imposition of associated deadlines do no favour in terms of cost distribution to the other major stakeholder in the SIM re-verification exercise, namely the telecom sector.

According to TeleGeography, a global telecom research firm, the MNOs have had to spend almost $60 million to date on biometric equipment, infrastructure, staff and retail outlet training, customer awareness campaigns and compliance monitoring. This figure does not take into account the inevitable loss of customers and business due to SIM de-activation. Placing this disproportionate cost burden in the name of ‘terror’ on one of the most significant capital investment sectors in Pakistan which, according to the PTA, has invested almost $1.8 billion during FY 2014 is yet another unwelcome outcome associated with the counterterrorism outlook which has paradoxically tainted what was once the government’s highly progressive telecom policy.

Furthermore, other negative connotations of the mandatory SIM registration policy such as loss of access to mobile communications due to SIM de-activation to a significant number of the population, as well as the inevitable growth of the stolen or unregistered SIMs black market will all be factors that the government will not be able to hide under the ‘terror’ cloak for very long.

The writer is visiting faculty on mobile technologies at the IBA, Karachi.

ymalik@iba.edu.pk

Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2015

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