300,000 Watan Cards Distributed: Nadra Chairman

According to a statement issued by Tariq Malik, Nadra has issued 300,000 Watan Cards to flood affected families.

KARACHI: National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) has issued 300,000 Watan Cards to flood affected families, ensuring the disbursal of Rs20,000 per family as announced by the government.

According to a statement issued here on Monday by Tariq Malik, the Deputy Chairman of Nadra, 225,000 families have drawn more than 2.5 billion rupees through the Watan Card scheme.

Malik assured that Nadra is consistently serving people in affected areas through 45 centers in Punjab , Khyber Pakhtoonkhawa and Sindh while similar efforts in the remaining areas are likely to be initiated by the end of the week.

He said that Nadra's role at these centers is restricted only to verifying affected people while ensuring law and order and providing security at the centers is the responsibility of the local administration and their provincial governments.

Regarding the large number of people scrambling to get the Watan Cards, Malik said that local DCOs and administrations are supposed to guide the flood victims to their concerned centers which will not only avoid influx of irrelevant people at the centers but would ensure security of staff at these sites enabling them to perform their duties more effectively.

He said that Nadra has processed approximately 135,000 CNICs in lieu of fresh and duplicate cards free of cost to the flood affectees on an emergency basis. Rejecting the impression that people are not being provided free of cost ID cards in Punjab, he said that no such instance has been reported to us and in fact, 65% of Watan cards were issued to the families residing in Punjab.

Malik added that Nadra is striving on zero error policy to ensure that only deserving families are issued Watan Cards enabling them to draw the benefits previously announced by the government.

Checks and balances

The Nadra chairman said that Nadra is striving on a zero error policy to ensure that only deserving families are issued Watan Cards. He said that the system does not allow any human intervention thus giving no space to corruption. He said that unscrupulous elements may manage to hoodwink citizens before entering the centers but no Nadra staff has been found involved in any kind of corruption.

Malik said that due to strong checks in the software prepared for Watan Cards the applicants who do not belong to notified calamity hit areas are not being processed by the system, the address of applicants is checked automatically by the Nadra software and if the area of residence of the applicant is not notified by the provincial government under the Calamity Act, the application is immediately rejected.

Malik says that those whose applications are rejected are blaming Nadra for corruption and creating a law and order situation at distribution centers.