Bangladeshi expats to come under SIM re-registration

The government is set to take the SIM re-registration process to foreign missions for the interests of expatriate Bangladeshis, who stand to have their mobile numbers blocked for missing the April 30 deadline.

The telecom division will write to the foreign ministry to take the necessary steps to temporarily install the fingerprint scanner, according to Tarana Halim, state minister for the division.

There are 71 Bangladeshi mission offices in 56 countries and the telecom division plans to send the devices to some of those countries.

About one crore Bangladeshi expatriates live in those countries and a good number of them use Bangladeshi SIMs when they come home, said officials of the telecom division.

“As we already saw a massive success within Bangladesh, we now want to spread it to those countries where a good number of Bangladeshi expatriates reside.”

More than five crore SIMs have been re-registered since the process kicked off in December 16 last year, she added.

As of February, the total number of active SIMs stands at 13.11 crore, according to Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission.

Mobile operators said their main concern at present is to get all the SIMs active within Bangladesh re-registered; once that has been done, they will look to the foreign missions.

Tarana also offered the post office premises to the mobile operators to run their re-registration process in the country's remotest areas. “We have offices in more than 8,000 remote places in the country. The operators can use these spaces, if they want, for their convenience,” she said, adding that it will be easier if all the operators place the biometric devices in one place in those areas.

After the April 30 deadline, the government will block the unregistered SIMs for some hours to notify the customers and after that, they will permanently be disconnected.

“The main purpose of the process is to heighten security of people. I request all mobile phone users to come and re-register their SIMs.” The mobile operators said they will roll out big campaigns within a day or two to make the biometric re-registration process a success.

Meanwhile, some 80.41 re-registration applications failed until March 20 as the fingerprints did not match with the ones provided on the national ID cards. The telecom division has now requested a fresh programme to update the fingerprints on the national database.

Tarana said the election commission's 170 local offices will arrange the programme shortly.