Minimising involvement: Joint Verification Committees dissolved across K-P

Police official believes step taken to expedite work on blocked CNICs

PESHAWAR: The Joint Verification Committees (JVC), headed by police officers to verify blocked computerised national identity cards, have been dissolved across the province.

“On April 26, we received a letter in which we were ordered to dissolve all the committees,” a police official told The Express Tribune.

He added the decision was taken by the federal government to increase the pace of work on the verification of blocked CNICs, as the involvement of too many departments was causing unnecessary delays.

JVC Peshawar former head DSP Osman Ghani said they were asked to dissolve the committee around 20 days ago.



“We received around 600 to 700 cases for verification each month and we had teams on police station level to go after these cases and verify them in the field,” Ghani added. He said the district police have been completely removed from the verification process and now special branch has been made responsible for the verification.

Change in ways

An official of the special branch of police told The Express Tribune in the new system, it is now up to National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) to decide on the departments to which the cases would be sent for verification.

“If they think the verification by special branch is good they would send us the case there and if they consider the Intelligence Bureau to be better than the case would be sent there for verification,” he said. “But the joint verification system is gone.”

He added, “Please do not confuse it with the re-verification of CNICs. These [JVCs] committees were there to verify only those CNICs that were blocked by NADRA for one reason or the other. NADRA showed JVCs the reasons for blocking the CNICs, the latter then had to check and report them back,” he added.

The JVCs were formed in 2014 on the order of the Ministry of Interior. It had representatives of six departments and its members included the police, special branch, Inter-Services Intelligence, Intelligence Bureau, NADRA and the Afghan Commissionerate in Peshawar.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 2^nd, 2016.