On February 23rd, Washington Post published a story about Pakistan’s effort to biometrically verify ownership of SIM cards. The title of the story, Pakistanis face a deadline: Surrender fingerprints or give up cellphone, and parts of its content gave an impression as if it was an effort to collect biometric information from people.

A section of  the story writes, “In one of the world’s largest — and fastest — efforts to collect biometric information, Pakistan has ordered cellphone users to verify their identities through fingerprints for a national database being compiled to curb terrorism”. This is not a factual statement, however.

In fact, Pakistani government is not collecting biometric information. It however, has asked its nationals to verify ownership of their SIM cards by matching their biometric information with the one present in the country’s national database.

NADRA (National Database and Registration Authority) of Pakistan already has biometrics of all the citizens of the country. When citizens apply for a National Identity Card or Passport, their biometrics are taken and saved in this national database.

The current fast-paced effort of biometric verification of ownership of SIM cards is thus carried out only to make sure that every SIM is used by its rightful owner and not someone else.

Moreover, it was a long due process and had to take place regardless of the terrorist attack on the school in which 150 people including 134 children got killed. If anything, such terrorist activities made this process a national priority.

Pakistanis in general were facing various problems due to sloppy registration process of mobile SIM cards in the past. Mobile numbers were virtually untraceable and readily used to harras people with impunity.

“A person used to harras me by sending me obscene texts on my cell phone, however he could not be nabbed by authorities because the SIM card he used was registered in the name of some poor man in a different city who didn’t have anything to do with it”, said Noreen, a business student in a local university.

“I am glad that at least now no one can hide behind an illegal and untraceable SIM card”, she further said.

However, illegal usage of SIMs was not just limited to harassing people. Grey traffickers had become a major problem for the law enforcement agencies.

The illegal gateway exchanges were causing a loss of almost $1 billion per year to the national exchequer. This grey trafficking business thrived because one could easily buy dozens of prepaid SIM cards from any part of the country.

Hence, the mandatory requirement of biometric verification of ownership of mobiles SIMS is going to solve a lot of problems for the people. Whether it can be successful in improving the security situation of the country, is going to be but an added benefit of it.