ON main Rashid Minhas Road near Aladin Park, traffic jams aren’t the aberration, they’re the routine here. But on Friday evening, I notice another reason for the mess.

Long lines of people — men and women, youngsters and senior citizens, many alone and scores with families — are lined up before three roadside stalls. The queues are so long and undisciplined that it is affecting traffic flow.

My curiosity leads me to explore, and soon I find that this scene is part of many others in the city and obviously across the country: the biometric verification of mobile phone connections. Here, the retailers of three different companies have set up temporary stalls.

Hamid Raza has been lucky enough to get through the whole process successfully as I catch him up. “Easily done,” he says. “Nothing special. They [the retailers] asked me for my original CNIC [computerised national identity card] number, mobile phone number and then took my thumb impression over a device.” An SMS alert makes him smile more broadly: “Look, here is a message from the company.”

But not many are as lucky as Raza. Mohammad Shujauddin’s request has been turned down. His thumb impression does not seem to be available in the Nadra record and after a few minutes of debate, the only option he has is to hire a rickshaw and leave.

“We don’t know,” replies the retailer to my query about the future of Shuja’s effort to get his connection verified. “May be he has to go to Nadra. Apply for a new CNIC. We deal with hundreds of such cases every day and don’t have enough time to engage in this debate.”

My chat with the retailer lasted hardly two minutes, but in that period I saw subscribers, one after another, turn away from the counter shaking their heads. After Shuja comes Shakira Nasir, then Yousuf Khan and the handicapped Saleem Ansari. None of them seems to be registered with Nadra biometrically. They all have to approach Nadra now.

“Getting anything done by Nadra? It’s impossible. I no longer need a mobile phone, bhai. I can live without it,” responds Ansari to the retailer’s advice.

As the government has decided upon the biometric verification of over 100 million prepaid cellular connections under the National Action Plan to block the misuse of the technology for terrorism, all the five service providers — Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Warid and Zong — are busy with it through more than 60,000 biometric devices being operated by their franchisees, customer services centres and retailers. Once the task is achieved by Feb 26, it is expected that the cellular data will be streamlined. But the ground reality is that law-abiding subscribers are being inconvenienced in a way they never agreed to when they got their mobile phone connections.

“I need a receipt,” Abdul Qadir is yelling at the retailer. “How can I trust just an SMS? What if I am caught tomorrow for using an unverified SIM? Should I keep the SMS saved in my phone which can be snatched any time in this city?”

Unheeded by almost everyone, he finds only me with whom to share his grievances. Qadir has three cellular connections from different companies and two of them sent him text messages saying that he doesn’t need to bother — that his connections are already verified.

“And the next day they sent a different text asking me to get the connections verified or face them being blocked,” he complains. “What should I do? Which text I should trust? I just requested him [the retailer] to give me a proper receipt of this process. They rudely said to rely on the company’s SMS.”

The retailers tell everybody that this is the law. But what most of them are not telling subscribers is the official fee for biometric verification. It is a Rs10 job, but the majority of retailers are charging double and in some case triple this sum. Despite repeated advertisements by mobile phone companies and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the move to stop the misuse of cellular connections is being exploited for financial gain.

Kamran Rasheed, who spends Rs90 for the verification of his and two daughters’ connections, wonders whether it’s the ignorance of the telecom regulator and companies or whether they simply don’t care. “A good thing is being done in a bad way,” he says. “You become a legal cellular subscriber by paying an illegal amount. They [the retailers] are charging like this in front of hundreds of people and the PTA and the companies say that people should come up with complaints!” Rasheed is so loud that the entire crowd can hear him, but many pay Rs30 for a Rs10 job.

“You humiliate people for hours in queues. Men with their wives and daughters are compelled to make your wrong a right,” he fumes. “Then, after hours, they are told that their thumb impressions are not available, their CNICs are not valid and you must pay Rs30 for a Rs10 job. Should we trust the sincerity of these people [PTA and cellular companies] this time, these people who cannot not check simple theft under the open sky?” He replies to his own question: “Never. It’s impossible.”

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play