The Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA) has completed necessary ground work to set up National Identity Cards Management Center (NIMC), which will distribute the cards to at least a certain number of people within the given timeframe. The NIMC, comprising 26 personnel initially, will be headed by Joint Secretary at the MoHA Narendra Dahal. [break]
NIDC was announced as a national program during the budget speech for the fiscal 2065/66. Following the announcement, a study was conducted by the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers (OPMCM), which recommended setting up NIMC to take charge of NIDC distribution.
MOHA has recently come up with an action plan to go ahead with NIMC and will soon take it up with the cabinet through the Ministry of General Administration. The action plan comprises Terms of Reference (TOR) and organizational structure of NIMC. According to officials at the management section of the MOHA, NIMC will function after approval from the cabinet.
To make the machine-readable card with a photo and bio-metric data of the card-holder easy to procure will, however, be a far cry for many years to come. “NIMC will need an efficient nationwide network to substitute the existing citizenship certificates with the new ones,” said an official.
For introduction of NIDC within the current fiscal, MOHA is going to follow the new electoral roll, which is now being developed by the Election Commission in seven VDCs of five districts under a pilot project. “We will use the data of the new electoral roll after a certain level of processing,” said Pralad Pokhrel, undersecretary at the MOHA.
It is believed that the NIDCs would help the state keep a central database of all the citizens. To maintain central database of the state, an office named Government Integrated Data Center (GIDC) is already operative.
Related story
There is a need to introduce fiscal policy reforms for Nepal’s...
