Kathmandu, April 9: The Education, Health and Information Technology Committee of the House of Representatives (HoR) has passed a report on the Security Printing Bill, 2077 deciding to print six different types of government documents relating to the national security only from the Security Printing Centre.
A meeting of the Committee held on Monday gave a final touch to the report concluding that the Centre should exclusively print the citizenship, national identity card, passport, banknote, excise duty sticker and driving license.
Earlier, the bill was approved by the National Assembly (NA) with the provision to print citizenship, national identity card, passport and banknotes from the Security Printing Centre.
The Committee under the HoR passed the bill by providing the Centre with the additional responsibility to print the excise duty sticker and driving license too.
During the meeting, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Rekha Sharma made it clear that the Centre will exclusively print crucial government documents adding that other state-owned agencies or organizations would be given the printing jobs of other documents except the citizenship, national identity card, passport, banknote, excise duty sticker and driving license if the Centre failed to carry out the assignment.
“This provision of giving the printing job to the private sector on the basis of competitive bidding by determining certain standards was kept only if printing could hot happen from this option,” Minister Sharma said.
“The issue could have been serious if the printing jobs were given to the private sector directly. Let’s award the private sector by deciding from the cabinet meeting on the basis of competition for printing (the documents) if the task of printing could not happen even by completing these two stages,” Minister Sharma argued.
Taking part in the discussion on the report, most of the lawmakers voiced that only the government should print the government documents that are related to national security.
Lawmakers Devendra Poudel, Chandra Bhandari, Toshima Karki and others called for managing the security printing issue without compromising the national interests. #nepal
