We need quality passports before smart ID cards

Bangladesh has decided to provide national ID card in the format of smart card when the country is struggling in providing its citizens better quality passports on time and in an efficient way. It is almost three decades that the country has failed to build a passport office in every city and ensure better immigration services. Still the country is based on a foreign company and expertise in making passports; and taking help from the army to manage the passport distribution that is, in fact, not a job for the military of a country.
Machine readable technology is an old and available technology. At every shopping mall you might have seen that a machine, in each cash counter, is reading price tag of the products and calculating the payment instantly. Regarding making the passport, soon this technology is going to be extinct, and IT based electronic passport is on the way to force the nations to adopt it; especially for quicker services and tracking down terrorists.
The country is producing low quality machine readable passports, looking worse than the manual one, and not international standard at all. Machine readable passport should be one paged, containing only name, date of birth, expiry date and passport number; only the machine will read the particulars of a passport holder, but very ridiculously the passport authority added a composed page containing passport holder's name, father, mother and wife's names, phone numbers, contact person name, contact person phone number, present and permanent addresses. It contradicts with the motto of machine readable passport; manual and MRP passports are existing together in the same passport, which indicates the passport authority doesn't know what machine readable means!
Voter ID card and national ID card are not the same thing but less populous country uses national ID card as voter ID card but for the population of 150 or 160 million you need a national ID registration office at every upazila with better infrastructure and IT skilled people. Is it possible in this poor country? In the countries of Eastern Europe, where population is much less and all cities have several offices, they provide passports within one to four days.
The passport department of Bangladesh is always in corruption. Recently they have given passports to Rohingya people, diplomatic passports were issued to ordinary citizens to travel to Turkey and they didn't return yet. The corruption is under an investigation.
At the time of submitting passport application form, the desk officer finds mistakes in the papers if you don't pay them; for corrections you have to pay again; for bank draft you have to pay tips; for police verification you have to pay et cetera. To get passports citizens of the country are paying much money and time than people of other countries.
The country might have understood that issuing ID cards would be an expensive venture; thus, they might have fixed fees for issuing the card, renewal, correction and updating. During the fifteen years tenure of the card, people would get married, divorced, will change addresses, obtain degrees, have children et cetera; for updating the card many times they have to visit the ID card office with papers and fees.
People, especially poor and illiterate ones in the villages, are often losing their ID cards. Floating and rootless people don't have place to preserve the card. The proposed fee is higher than per capita income of the people and budget for making ID cards for the huge population is not enough. In such circumstances the ID card project is producing corruption like the passport department. For example, a few months ago two officials of NID Wing were fired for their involvement with bribery in association with touts which is an old practice at the passport offices. Recently most of the newspapers reported how corruption, inefficacy and irregularity are going on in the NID office. Finally, they had to allow the citizens to take online print out of ID card for submitting purposes.
The national ID card project was imposed upon people during the last military backed government; for the influence of foreign nations on the grounds of the citizens tracking in the name of national security and as part of the global terrorist hunting. At that time SIM card re-registration was done by multinational mobile phone companies. It is very risky and a threat to the national security if foreign companies collect personal data of the citizens; and allowing foreign missions, banks, government and non-government offices to access the citizens' personal data can bring a havoc to the people. Integrating the citizens' databases with the information in SIM card, national ID card and MRP passport, TIN number can be difficult because we don't have infrastructure and skills.
Britain once had stepped back from the National ID card project due to controversial debates. Civil right activists uttered logics against bringing the country into the Orwellian society which George Orwell predicted in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four published in 1948, many years before the availability of surveillance gadgets. But, now, UK is going to make mandatory ID card for the immigrants for having a Big Brother's eye over them.  
So-called IT experts and companies are misleading the country towards adopting ID card when the country failed to have machine readable passports. Even with many years' effort we failed to prepare a minimum flawless voter list that is much needed than the smart cards. The so-called experts have ganged up with government officials to get such business because now the third world has become a potential market for biometric systems, informatics, visual surveillance, ID card, CCTV, MRP passport et cetera. However, the country must lay first priority on providing passports than national ID cards because our passport holders abroad are building economic backbone of the country.   

The writer is a journalist and IT analyst. He can be reached at [email protected]