National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) has established a counter at the Pakistani Embassy in Oslo, Norway, to provide comprehensive identity document services to Pakistanis residing in Norway.
This new counter will serve as a one-stop service center for NADRA’s services, ensuring convenience for the large Pakistani diaspora in the region.
The authority has also announced that similar counters are in the works for other countries with significant Pakistani populations. These include Manama (Bahrain), Montreal and Vancouver (Canada), Italy (Milan) and Pretoria (South Africa).
Currently, NADRA counters are available at multiple Pakistani missions in the United States (Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston), Spain (Madrid), Greece (Athens), Germany (Berlin), France (Paris), Oman (Muscat), Turkey (Istanbul), Canada (Toronto), Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Kuwait and Australia (Sydney).
Additionally, NADRA operates registration centers in countries such as Saudi Arabia (Jeddah, Riyadh and Madinah), United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Abu Dhabi), Qatar (Doha) and United Kingdom (London, Manchester, Birmingham and Bradford). These centers and counters ensure that overseas Pakistanis can access all services related to identity documentation, providing them with the same level of service they would receive within Pakistan.
It also organizes regular mobile registration operations in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia to provide registration services to expatriates at their doorstep.
A report by Pakistan’s main intelligence agency warns that the personal records of up to 100 million Pakistanis may have been stolen by foreign intelligence agencies due to the alleged links of a software vendor with Israel. The Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), Pakistan’s premier spy agency, said that the software used by the National Data base and Registration Authority (NADRA), which issues national identity cards on behalf of the government of Pakistan, is not secure and should be replaced by an “indigenous” software product.
Established in 1998 as the National Database Organization, NADRA operates under Pakistan’s Ministry of the Interior. Its main mission is to register and fingerprint every Pakistani citizen and supply every adult in the country with a secure Computerized National Identity Card. This has proven to be a Herculean task in a country of 182 million, of whom just over half are over the age of 18. Consequently, the NADRA electronic database contains files on over 96 million Pakistanis, making it one of the world’s largest centralized databases.
