NID cards to be corrected in upazilas too

People will no longer have to come to the National Identity Registration Wing's (NIDW) headquarters in the capital's Agargaon for corrections in national identity cards as the service will be provided from upazila election offices.

"Now we are facing huge pressure at our head office...Such a huge number of applications and public gathering creates chaos...It will make the service comfortable for people," Director General Brig Gen Sultanuzzaman Md Saleh Uddin of NIDW told The Daily Star on the decision taken yesterday.

NIDW, an associate body of the Election Commission (EC), corrected around 1 lakh NID cards upon receiving around 2.5 lakh applications in the last couple of months, he said.

The EC has been preparing the cards along with the voter list with photographs from 2007.

A large number of people who got the cards on registering as voters faced spelling mistakes and wrong information and they have been gathering at the headquarter for amendments.

The gathering intensified in the last couple of months as the government's new pay scale made it mandatory providing the card number in a particular form for accessing salaries.

Meanwhile in a letter to the EC, the ruling Awami League named its president, Sheikh Hasina, as the person who would attest their chairman aspirants in the upcoming union parishad (UP) polls.

The EC sought the names on February 11, asking the 40 registered political parties to provide it to returning officers.

The EC on Thursday announced that elections to 4,275 of the over 4,500 UPs, the lowest tier of the local government system, will be held, on partisan lines for the first time, in six phases starting March 22.