The Election Commission is set to approve a proposal next Sunday to increase the fees for NID corrections by almost twelve and a half times. Currently, an ordinary citizen has to pay a maximum of 400 taka to correct information on their national ID card, but under the new proposal, they will have to pay 5,000 taka. An additional 15% VAT will also apply. This means the total cost for one correction will be 5,750 taka. The interim government that came to power just a few months ago with promises of reform and public welfar,e has shown through this decision that filling the state treasury is more important to them than reducing the suffering of ordinary people.
The question is: what is the justification for such an unreasonable price hike? Even officials within the Election Commission fear that this decision will put the public in further distress. Around eighty thousand people apply for NID corrections every month. Many of them come from poor or lower-income families for whom 5,000 taka is by no means a small amount. Yet the policymakers of the government show no empathy toward this reality.
The NID card is a citizen’s fundamental identity document. From opening a bank account to applying for a job, making a passport, obtaining a SIM card, land registration, and even receiving COVID-19 vaccinations, every public and private service requires this card. And if there is any factual error on this card, a citizen becomes practically invisible to the state. Their right to access services becomes paralyzed. In this context, increasing the correction fee essentially means making access to a citizen’s basic documentation expensive.
What is even more concerning is that under the proposed rule, if any error remains after one correction or if further correction is needed, the fee will increase each time. That means 5,000 taka the first time, 10,000 the second time, and 15,000 the third time. This system is so unreasonable that people who genuinely face factual issues will find correction nearly impossible. It is as if a new method of punishing citizens has been invented.
This step by the Yunus government is not only anti-people, it is also fundamentally a class-biased decision. For wealthy individuals, 5,000 taka may not matter much, but for a rickshaw-puller, day laborer, small trader, or marginal farmer, that amount is equal to almost a month’s food expenses. As a result, the real victims of this rule will be the poor and middle-class. They may be forced to live with incorrect information or to pay brokers and corrupt actors even more money to make illegal corrections.
The existing NID correction system already faces widespread allegations of complexity and corruption. Complaints of harassment, delays in processing applications, demands for bribes, and extra charges through intermediaries are common. Instead of taking effective action to eliminate this corruption, the government is increasing fees—meaning they are not interested in solving the problem but in profiting from it. This is nothing but institutional looting.
The proposed regulations also remove the authority to correct birthdates from field-level officers and centralize it under the Director General of the NID Registration Wing in Dhaka. This means that if a citizen’s birthdate is incorrect, they will have to travel from their village or district town to Dhaka and appear at the EC’s main office. One does not need to be an economist to understand how anti-people this decision is. How much will a person from a remote area in Sylhet or Chattogram have to spend on travel, accommodation, food, and lost wages to make this correction? And who will bear this burden? Ordinary people.
Even more absurd is the decision to give only one official—the Director General—the authority to correct birthdates. Is it possible for one person to process thousands of applications from across the country on time? If eighty thousand people apply every month, how many of these applications involve birthdate corrections? Surely not a small number. How can one official handle such a massive workload? The result will be long delays, harassment, and a complete failure in service delivery. And it is the people who will pay the price.
Although the new regulations set specific timelines for processing applications—ranging from seven to forty-five days—this sounds good only on paper. In reality, deadlines are rarely followed in Bangladesh’s bureaucracy. And if they are not followed, where is the accountability? What punishment will an official face for violating the deadline? The proposed regulations offer no clear guidelines on this. Therefore, this is nothing more than a token gesture.
Since coming to power, the interim government’s actions have shown a consistent pattern. They are imposing additional financial burdens on people in the name of reforms. Electricity, gas, and fuel prices are rising on one hand, and the prices of essential commodities are spiraling out of control on the other. Now, an added burden is the increased cost of a basic service like NID correction. These steps clearly show that this government does not value the suffering of ordinary citizens.
When Dr. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Prize, he was known as a friend of the poor. But every decision he has made since sitting in the seat of power exposes how false that image was. Would a true friend of the poor make a decision where a lower-income person must spend almost a month’s wages to correct their ID card? This is not reform; it is blatant exploitation.
What is even more shocking is that the Election Commission itself has proposed this rule—an institution whose purpose is to protect people’s voting rights and assist in establishing citizens’ identities. But now it has turned into a tool of exploitation. If this proposal is approved, whatever little trust the public still has in the Election Commission will be destroyed entirely.
