Govt excludes senior citizens from biometric verification rule

The government has decided to eliminate the condition of biometric verification for the senior citizens and for those who have unclear fingerprints. The government on Tuesday decided to abolish the mandatory condition to facilitate citizens to open bank accounts and to get their CNIC, and SIM without having to perform biometric verification.

The State Bank of Pakistan last year issued a directive that that all the commercial banks including microfinance and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) must verify the bank accounts of their customers with biometrics, and gave a deadline of 30th June 2019, after which the bank was directed to temporary block all bank accounts which are not verified through biometric procedure.

After this directive, many senior citizens filed complaints to the government that they are facing problems while getting their accounts biometrically verified. The issue which they were facing was that the machines were facing difficulty to capture their fingerprints as the skin had lost its elasticity with age.

PM Imran Khan later took notice of those complaints and issued orders to exclude people with unclear fingerprints and senior citizens from this condition. The notification issued by the PM office stated that they have “eliminated the need for biometric verification for people facing genuine issues, including senior/old age citizens with uneven texture/ unclear fingerprints”.

However, those excluded people are still required to provide an undertaking to their bank declaring that the details provided to the bank about them are correct. Furthermore, the senior citizens will also not need biometric verification to get a mobile SIM, CNIC or a passport. Imran Khan has also instructed NADRA to complete the process within 30 days.