People from now on will have to pay Tk100-1000 for renewal or correction of their National Identity (NID) cards.
The charges come into effect from today.
People first availed the NID services free of cost from the Election Commission after its introduction in 2007.
In case of losing or damaging the card, the receiver needs to pay Tk200 and Tk300 as normal and urgent service charges respectively to get a fresh NID card for the first time while Tk300 and Tk500 for the second time and Tk500 and Tk1,000 for every next time.
To correct information inscribed in a NID card, people will have to count Tk200 for the first time while Tk300 and Tk400 respectively for the second time and every next time.
For renewing a NID card, the service receiver will have to pay Tk100 and Tk150 to obtain regular and urgent services respectively.
Besides, if anyone wants to correct his data stored in EC server the person will have to pay Tk100 to avail the service for the first time, Tk200 for the second time and Tk300 for every next time.
In June last, the Commission issued gazette notifications fixing the service fees with effect from September 1 ahead of introduction of high security featured smart NID card instead of laminated NID card printed on normal paper.
The service receivers will have to deposit the fees in the Code No 1-0601-0001-1847 of Sonali Bank or send the fees through treasury challan to EC Secretary from any branch of Sonali Bank, or pay order or bank draft from any bank to EC Secretary, he said.
EC Secretary Sirazul Islam said people will be able to avail the NID services from the EC’s Upazila or Thana offices after depositing the fees through online banking from any branch of Sonali Bank, or pay order or treasury challan to EC secretary.
The service receivers will have to submit supportive documents along with payment slip of the fee to the EC’s offices, he told reporters at his EC secretariat office.
Besides, the people can avail online NID service, he noted.
For the Dhaka city dwellers, the commission set up booths in its 15 Thana offices located in eight areas to provide the NID services, he added.
“We have decentralised the services for easing the sufferings of the people,” the EC secretary said.
Moreover, in case of availing NID verification service, an organisation or agency will have to count Tk5,00000 registration fee initially and Tk2,00000 for every verification of data of any particular person.
But in case of any government agency, the verification fee would be Tk1,00000 instead of Tk2,00000.
In this regard, the EC secretary said due to providing verification services to any organisation, privacy of the nationals will not be hampered as the commission is giving only NID card verification service not access to personal information.
“We are providing verification services to the organisations just saying that if any particular NID card is authentic or not,” he said.
There are data of the country’s 96.20m voters in the EC NID server and 92m people got the laminated NID cards.