NADRA’s Major Achievements: Unknown to Majority Pakistani Population

Established in the year 2000, NADRA, the National Database and Registration Authority, is Pakistan's state-owned IT services company that specializes in implementing multi-biometric national identity cards and e-passports, as well as secure access verification and control systems in both public and private sectors. It is recognized amongst the Top 50 IT firms in the world by the ID World Congress.

 NADRA’s database is among the largest, fully integrated databases in the world that supports both an Automatic Finger Identification System (AFIS) and a Facial Recognition System comprise, National Data Warehouse, Storage Capacity of 60 Terabytes, Processing Speed of 18 Trillion Instructions/ Sec, Multilingual Support of English/ Urdu/ Sindhi, AFIS with a matching speed of 16 million/sec, World's largest Facial Library of 83 million images (ICAO), Network Infrastructure, Highly redundant, scalable and mission critical, Connected with more than 8000 computers equipped with Pentium Three and Four Processors, Equipped Terrestrial, VSAT, and DVB RCS/2 network Links.

 NADRA some of the achievements that most residents of Pakistan are unaware of are its INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS.

The international clients of NADRA are as followed

Government Of Sudan	Civil Registration Project
Government Of Kenya	Passport Issuing System
Government Of Bangladesh	Passport & High Security Driver’s License
Government Of Nigeria	Civil Registration Project

 Government of Sudan

            NADRA was handed over the Civil Registration Project by Sudan’s Ministry of Interior in the year 2007 because of maintaining an excellent track record over the past seven years on international front in the field of Data Acquisition, Secure Identity Card Production, Data Warehousing, Networks, and Software Development and Integration. The warehouse will be integrated with multiple internal and external interfaces, which records all events of births, marriages, divorces, deaths and family certificates.

Government of Kenya

The e-passports were not successful or limited to the boundaries of Pakistan but the Kenya government has awarded contract to NADRA to design, develop and implement this project. On 13th February, 2009, it was reported that Kenya has issued 85,000 passports using NADRA's Machine Readable Passport (MRP) system and still counting.

Government of Bangladesh

One of the Major international projects contracted to NADRA was creating programmed Driver’s License for the Bangladeshi’s general public in 2004. In this regard a contract signing ceremony was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh between NADRA and Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) at ministry of communications. The contract was signed by Chairman NADRA Brig. (R) Saleem Ahmad Moeen and Dr. MA Memon Chairman Bangladesh Road Transport Authority. This was done in order reduce the use of fake driver’s license and have a proper record of the registered drivers. Apart from the driver’s license, a delegation of Bangladeshi officials visited Pakistan in 2004 and sought help from NADRA officials to introduce machine-readable passport (MRP) system in Bangladesh. Brig (r) Saleem Moeen assisted the Bangladeshi officials and Technical facilities for MRP project were provided by NADRA that include software, hardware and staff training for Immigration and Passport department.

Government of Nigeria

 In 2009, Nigerian government appointed different top IT firms from all over the globe including USA, UK, Germany and India, but Pakistan was the one that gave the lowest bid and was chosen to construct national database registration for Nigeria. The contract in this regard was signed in a prestigious ceremony held in Abuja, Nigeria between Mr. Gohar Khan, Chief Project Officer NADRA and Mr. Chris Onyemenam, Director General, National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) Nigeria, for the completion of the back-end of Nigeria Identity Management System.

“This is a landmark achievement that will further strengthen the ties between Pakistan and Nigeria. The system has been indigenously developed by NADRA and its delivery will empower the Government of Nigeria to issue tamperproof and secure Computerized ID Cards to Nigerian citizens” said Chairman NADRA.

NADRA’s expertise in IT solution has earned international acclaim due to which international projects were conferred to NADRA. Its ability to perform and deliver is recognized by many countries. The I.T sector of NADRA over all is much occupied. It has also offered solution to many problems of national level which were previously thought to be insoluble. NADRA with its I.T sector so strong and yielding with such mobility it is really an epitome of its kind. Collecting managing and evaluating with such hegemony a database comprising of millions NADRA IT sector is absolute.

Adnan Babar
Sec F
11U0741