Islamabad:
The Minister of State of the Interior, Talal Chaudhry, has said that the Government has taken solid measures to stop the misuse of identity documents and emphasized that there was no provincial discrimination during national verification campaigns of families and national identity cards (CNIC).
Answering the questions of the senators during the session of the upper house the other day, the minister declared that more than 5,000 passports issued to the people who falsely claim the Pakistani nationality were detected abroad, mainly in Saudi Arabia, and subsequently surrendered by the holders themselves, admitting that they were not Pakistani citizens.
Chaudhry said the investigations showed that many of these identities were fraudulently inserted into family trees, either by Nadra’s staff involved in negligence or by families deliberately, including non -nationals for personal reasons.
He added that such fraudulent additions not only led to the issuance of CNIC, but also facilitated the acquisition of Pakistani passports for foreign citizens.
To stop this misuse, the Ministry of Interior conducted verification campaigns at the national level in 2014 and 2019, with the aim of cleaning the national database and validating family records. In addition, the Government has established a dual verification mechanism that involves a committee at the district level headed by the Deputy Commissioner and a Zonal Verification Board, which reviews the marked cases referred to by the agencies of application of the law or intelligence.
Talal informed the Chamber that no specific action of the province was taken. “Nadra operates nationwide, and we don’t treat any region differently,” he said. He acknowledged that the highest cases of misuse of identity were observed in Baluchistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, but emphasized that the problem was not rooted in regional bias, rather in the misuse of the system by certain individuals.
To improve transparency, Nadra also launched a public facilitation system, allowing citizens to verify their family trees by telephone and inform any unauthorized person linked to their records. Of the total complaints received, 71,000 cases involved reports of individuals included in family trees without consent.
Chaudhry also confirmed that internal responsibility measures have been taken, with 266 Nadra employees dismissed and others penalized after departmental consultations. He stressed that the officers of all ranges, including attached directors, were responsible and criminal procedures were initiated when necessary.
He assured the house that any case highlighted by the parliamentarians would be reexamined and reverified.
