The government is set to provide over 30 million students across the country with unique identity numbers by 2020.
Pre-primary school-goers aged five to 10th graders aged 17 will be provided with a 10 or 16 digit identification number which will later be used as their national identification number.
The move will ensure that fresh information won’t have to be collected for their national IDs.
Back in 2010, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had ordered a civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) system to be designed.
The unique ID will contain more information than the current national ID.
The project will be executed in two phases. The primary and mass education ministry and Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS) will be implementing them under two separate project titles ‘Profile for Primary School Students’ and ‘Establishment of Integrated Educational Information Management System.’
According to primary and mass education ministry sources, the data of 8.7 million students will be collected under the ‘Profile for Primary School Students’ project. They will collect the data of students aged between five and 10 year and the information will be matched with their parents’ national IDs.
The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) has already approved the Tk 1.64 billion project
“The project is underway. Pre-Primary School students aged five will be brought under a database,” said Primary and Mass Education Secretary Md Akram-Al-Hossain told Bangla Tribune.
He added that through the unique identification number the student’s information will be updated and it will eventually be used as a NID number.
“There is no scope for duplication in this system. It has been adapted to implement the CRVS,” he said.
BANBEIS sources said that nearly 15 million sixth to 10th graders aged 11 to 17 will be given the unique IDs under the ‘Establishment of Integrated Educational Information Management System’ project.
ECNEC has approved Tk 3.13 billion for the project set to begin in 2020. Professor Shamsul Alam has already been appointed as the project director.
Shamsul Alam said that CRVS is a citizen data structure and internationally contains information on birth date, cause and day of death, marriage, divorce and adoption.
“Bangladesh will include three more things: migration, enrollment and service delivery. We are calling it CRVS++” he said.
He added if any government organisation runs the unique identity number and eventually all the citizens will come under the database and extra funds won’t be required for population count.
A steering committee was formed in 2014 to oversee the establishment of CRVS and a secretariat by the same name was also formed the next year.