Bangladeshis have multiple IDs provided by different parts of government that do not fully talk to each other.
Births and deaths are registered in one place, health and vaccine cards are provided in another place, school registration is done elsewhere, unique voter numbers (“NID”) are generated from one office, ePassports require biometrics to be provided separately at another office.
Some have a one-directional mapping from one to the other; virtually none of them are mapped in both directions. Every one of them has their own data fields to fill; most of them conduct their own verification. If you make changes in one place, there is no guarantee that the changes will be reflected in another.
There’s probably some turf issue between departments as to who should be the ultimate owner of a single, universal ID.
That is why very little progress was made towards streamlining these, for the benefit of citizens (both at home and abroad).
My colleague Faiz Taiyeb (ফয়েজ আহমদ তৈয়্যব) and I brought everyone together today to discuss pain-points and agree on producing a roadmap to resolve this.
It won’t be easy but a clear roadmap with “who needs to do what by when” is a minimum starting point.
