History
After the establishment of State of Pakistan, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan launched the Personal Identity System (PIS) program to registered, managed and issued all national identification cards to the citizens of Pakistan, including the East Pakistanis in East-Pakistan and the Indian Muslims immigrants settling in elsewhere in Pakistan. Changes were carried out by Election Commission of Pakistan in 1965 for the process of the voter's registration to hold the nationwide 1965 presidential election. In 1969–70, the amendments in the PIS program continue by the Election commission until the election commission supervised the 1970 general elections.
After the 1971 war with India, followed by the accession of the East-Pakistan as Bangladesh, a new statistical database system was needed to ensure the safety of Pakistan's citizens as well as the national security of the country. In 1973, a new database system was codified under the Second Amendment, §30, of the Constitution of Pakistan to perform and contain the statistical database of the citizens of Pakistan. Registration of Pakistan's citizens and statistic database in government's computer accounts was started in 1973, with the promulgation of the constitution of the country. This new program was visioned and started by then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
In 1973, in a parliamentary session, Bhutto stated in parliament to the people of Pakistan, "due to the absence of full statistical database of the people of this country, this country is operating in utter darkness." The government start issuing the National Identity Card (NIC) numbers to its citizens and began performing government databases of the people in the government computers.
National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) was established as National Database Organization (NDO), an attached department under the Ministry of Interior, Government of Pakistan in 1998. On 10 March, 2000, NDO & Directorate General of Registration (DGR) merged to form NADRA, an independent corporate body with requisite autonomy to operate independently and facilitate good governance. With the mandate of developing a system for re-registering 150 million citizens, NADRA launched the Multi-Biometric National Identity Card project developed in conformance with international security documentation issuance practices in the year 2000. The program replaced the paper based Personal Identity System of Pakistan that had been in use since 1971. To date over 96 Million citizens in Pakistan and abroad have utilized the system and its allied services to receive tamper resistant ISO standard Identification Documents.
Since 2004, NADRA has maintained its position among the top 50 companies of the world in the field of secure document solution integration.. NADRA not only takes pride in producing the Computerised National ID Card of Pakistan but also in producing the world’s first Machine Readable Multi-Biometric Electronic Passport.
Read more about this topic: National Database And Registration Authority
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