ID card bloopers: What’s in a name — apparently a lot

238 cases have been filed against NADRA since January.

LAHORE: Scores of litigants have approached civil courts complaining about mistakes on computerised national identity cards, issued by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), over the last three months, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Several of these litigants have approached two civil courts seeking directions to the NADRA to correct mistakes relating to date of birth, gender, name, religion and address.

As many as 238 such cases have been filed in civil courts since January. Seventy six cases were filed in Civil Judge Khalid Saleem’s court in January, 14 cases were filed in February and 18 in March. As many as 82 cases on the issue were filed in Civil Judge Khalil Ahmed’s court in January, 12 cases in February and 36 in March.

Last week, litigant Majja obtained a decree in his favour on a petition seeking a change of name. He said he had visited the NADRA office for a CNIC, he said he filled out the requisite forms, but when he received the CNIC, it said his name was Bajja. He said this had caused him great embarrassment in front of his family and friends. He said he couldn’t show anyone his CNIC as even strangers poked fun at him when he did.

Shahid Ali, another litigant, told the court that he was a man but the NADRA had registered him as a woman. He said that he hadn’t noticed the error for a long time, but when he went to have his CNIC photocopied for a job interview, he found out that he was officially a woman.

Yet another litigant, Samuel Masih, said that he was a Christian but the NADRA records said that he was a Muslim. He said that his family had accused him of converting, even though he had not.

Several other litigants have filed petitions complaining about incorrect dates of birth and residential addresses mentioned on the CNICs. When they approached NADRA offices to have the errors corrected, they claimed, the NADRA employees had refused to do so.

Protocol Officer Muhammad Luqman, talking to The Express Tribune on behalf of the NADRA, said most of these mistakes occurred because of the “illiterate” people who did not mention their correct names or dates of birth. “Of course, NADRA officials are to blame in some of the cases,” he said. However, in most of the cases, people do not fill the forms carefully...they sometimes write nicknames or shortened versions of their names...and later object when they are printed on their CNICs. They visit us to complain about the names on their cards, but when their forms are examined, it turns out that the fault occurred at their end, not NADRA’s.

He said according to the standard operating procedure, anyone can request the NADRA office to have their CNICs corrected within 90 days. They are not charged extra for it, he said, but when people do not even bother to check their CNICs when they receive them, what is the NADRA to do? “However, the NADRA office is working to make its system more viable.”

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2014.