Multiple NIDs of single citizen cancelled, first one active, says NID registration chief

All citizens who previously held multiple national ID (NID) cards now have one active NID after the Election Commission (EC) cancelled their second cards, according to ASM Humayun Kabir, chief of the National Identity Registration Wing.

Speaking to reporters at the EC headquarters on Monday, he said the authorities had identified 586 citizens who were unable to avail of national services due to having two NIDs registered in their names.

“We have revoked the issue. Because they had two NIDs, their IDs were locked and so they weren’t able to access any citizen services. As we kept the first and cancelled the second, their original NIDs are now active."

Earlier, on May 5, Humayun spoke about the initiative to cancel the second NID card of anyone who holds more than one and leave the first one activated.

On Monday, he said multiple NID cards could result in conflicting information for the same person in the voter list.

“At the moment, to our knowledge, no one else has two NIDs. If someone else comes up -- we will take the same action.”

The EC's NID database contains information on more than 125 million citizens. “Information leaks” from this database have occurred before.

Humayun said that all kinds of measures have been taken to prevent the risk of information leaks.

“Since our data centre is operational 24 hours a day, we sometimes shut it down and restart it. For maintenance, we did it the day before yesterday (Saturday) and were able to start it after 4 hours. It is a part of regular maintenance.

“The officials assessed the data centre for any issues that may exist, whether it is updated. We took all the necessary measures. Now the data centre is completely safe.

“We are not facing any challenges with data at the moment. But since it is a database, we carry out routine activities to ensure that data is not leaked or damaged for some reason.”