NID card not easy to get

With her one-and-a-half-month-old child in the arms, Umme Kulsum was hurrying from one desk to another at the National Identity Registration Wing (NIDW) office.

The National Identity (NID) card issued to her had her name wrongly spelt. She applied for a corrected one five months ago.

It was February 25, the day she was supposed to get it.

But every NIDW official Kulsum approached disappointed her, saying the card was not ready yet.

"This is the fourth time that they gave me an NID delivery date and made me come here," said Kulsum, who works as a private hospital staff and resides in Chandpur.

In the meantime, her child had started screaming amid the hustle and bustle of the crowd.

Tired, exhausted and desperate, she then went to a senior NIDW official and told him about her sufferings.

Thanks to the official's intervention, Kulsum got her NID card later that day.

As per the rules, the NIDW is supposed to deliver a corrected or renewed card within 30 working days since the application is filed.

This correspondent visited the NIDW office on a couple of occasions three weeks ago and found that almost all of the several hundred people, who go there seeking NID services every day, have to go through the same sufferings, if not more, as Kulsum had to.

People, who want corrections of their NID cards or fresh copies of them, queue up at the office in Agargaon. Photo: Palash Khan

"I applied for correction of my name's spelling in the card around a month ago. They [NIDW officials] asked me to come today [February 23] to take the card. But now they are saying that card has not been printed yet," said Imam Hossain, who resides in the capital's Mohakhali area.

In response to the allegations, NIDW Director General Brig Gen Sultanuzzaman Md Saleh Uddin says sometimes it takes longer than usual to verify information of the card holders and that's the main reason behind the delay in service delivery.

Then again, an excessive number of service seekers and mismanagement of the authorities concerned make the entire office premises very chaotic.

On February 23 afternoon, over two dozen people were seen hurling expletives at an Ansar man who was assigned to maintain the queue of service seekers.

The Ansar member had allegedly allowed someone to break the queue and let them stand in the front.

Moments later, at least one hundred people, who were in the queue, started shouting again, this time for speeding up the card delivery process.

The authorities were not moved at all. After shouting for around 10 minutes, the people eventually went quiet, they could change nothing.

Such chaos comes as a boon for the swindlers. A number of them were found selling application forms for new NID cards at Tk 10.

Though the forms are supposed to be distributed free of cost by the NIDW officials, the distribution outlets are open only for certain hours of the day and people have to stand in queues to get them. So, people often prefer paying Tk 10 to going through all those hassles.

To deal with an ever-increasing number of service seekers, the NIDW central office in Dhaka from February 15 stopped accepting applications for correcting the NID cards. People have to do that through the upazila election offices concerned.

But around 2:00pm on February 23, a swindler was found telling a service seeker that he could get the NID card corrected through underhand dealings.

Sensing presence of the correspondent, the duo went away.

Asked about this, NIDW chief Saleh Uddin said the authorities often conduct drives against them and some have already been arrested.

People have to endure sufferings because of the excessive number of people who come every day to seek service, he said

"But we hope that the sufferings will be lessened as the NID card correction service has been decentralised to the upazila-level election offices."

Since 2008, the NIDW has received more than 6 lakh applications for the NID correction, around 2.5 lakhs in the past three months, according to the NIDW director general.

They have delivered 4.5 lakh corrected NIDs already and the rest expected to be served by this month, he added.