Thumb verification to cost 150% more

Nadra raises fee from Rs10 per vote to Rs25

ISLAMABAD : The country’s top database authority continues to make its services expensive for general public.

After a recent hefty increase in its fee structure for the computarised national identity card, the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) has now announced a whopping 150% rise in the thumb impression verification fee.

Nadra used to charge Rs10 for verifying thumb impression on one vote. Now, the fee has been increased to Rs25 with the approval of the Nadra Authority Board.

The fee raise will affect election candidates, applying to Nadra for verification of voters’ thumbs over suspicion of rigging in their respective constituencies. The candidates will now have to pay 150% more than whey they had hitherto paid.

For example, in 2015, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chief Imran Khan had paid Rs1.83 million for verification of thumb impression in NA-122. Khan had lost the election in the constituency to Ayaz Sadiq of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz.

Later an election tribunal ordered thumb verification in NA-122. As many as polled 183,000 votes were verified by Nadra in the constituency. If the polled votes remain the same, a candidate would have to pay Rs4.57 million for the same exercise.

Nadra had earned millions of rupees through vote verification by processing the election material in some 43 disputed cases related to the national and provincial assembly constituencies on the directions of election tribunals formed to resolve disputes between winner and runner-up candidates.

The rise in the thumb impression verification fee came to the knowledge of the general public through recent correspondence between Nadra and the election tribunal in Chakwal.

An election tribunal had asked Nadra for thumb verification in an election petition. In response, the authority informed the tribunal that it has “dismantled its facility and allied resources developed to verify thumb impression following the 2013 general elections”.



The election tribunal has been told that in case the candidate still insists on verification, he has to pay Rs0.5 million for re-development of facility as well as Rs25 for verification of one vote.

A senior Nadra official said the authority had reasons behind taking the decision. He said after the local government elections, several contesting candidates challenged the election results and opted for the thumb impression verification.

“Currently, Nadra has a capacity to process 70 to 80 thousands identity cards per day, and it also receives a similar number of applications daily related to national identity documents,” he said, adding, “The verification exercise puts extra burden on Nadra’s resources and such requests are processed by compromising daily processing of identity cards.”

Given the situation, Nadra has decided to raise the fee to discourage this practice which proved almost a flop in the past.

“In the past, Nadra record shows that it only succeeded in reading approximately 35 to 40% of the thumb impressions it received for verification from tribunals. The practice created doubts about the results due to significant number of unverified votes,” he said.

The Nadra official said it was just a ‘popular but false statement’ from the previous Nadra management that the authority could verify votes through technology. The results of verification by Nadra contradicted that claim, he added.

He said the thumb verification exercise not only caused financial burden to an applicant, but also wasted Nadra’s time. “Moreover, the presence of unverified votes in a constituency results in unwarranted doubts about election results,” he said.