Nepal will buy 10 million Automated Biometric Identification System licences from French firm IN Groupe without competitive bidding, a decision that hands the parent company of IDEMIA the software backbone of the national ID card programme through a government-to-government arrangement.
The Cabinet took the decision at its June 12 meeting, acting on a proposal from the Department of National Identity and Civil Registration under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Of the 10 million licences, 1.5 million will be bought directly from the company and the remainder will come under the government-to-government deal. An ABIS licence is a software authorisation contract permitting an agency to store, process and match a set quantity of biometric records, with hard caps on database size and concurrent users.
The department is moving because the existing licence is at the end of its life. “Since the ABIS system licence has already expired, the Department of National Identity and Civil Registration has been facing operational difficulties,” an official said, with only some thousands of licences left in its vault. Because almost every government service is linked to the national ID card, and the passport department relies on the same biometrics, service seekers have repeatedly run into problems.
Officials are invoking Clause 3 and Article 41 of the Public Procurement Act, which permit direct purchase where only one supplier has the technical capacity, holds exclusive rights, or where proprietary goods must come from an incumbent to preserve compatibility. Safran Identity originally supplied the system, and the division responsible passed to IN Groupe when IDEMIA sold its Smart Identity business in 2025. Even so, officials have not offered a clear public justification for skipping a tender.
Krishna Poudel, director general at the department, said the home ministry has formed a negotiation team to deal with IN Groupe. “The price of the ABIS system will be finalised after the negotiation team concludes discussions and reaches an agreement,” he said. “We have already communicated our decision to the company.” The department has proposed a rate of 0.0995 euros per licence, the same price the supplier offered in 2019, when a Cabinet decision authorised expanding capacity to register up to 30 million citizens.
The government has clashed with identity document vendors before, having cancelled a national ID system support tender in favour of in-house management and issued e-passport contract letters to Veridos and Mühlbauer amid an IDEMIA challenge. IDEMIA has supplied Nepal’s passports since 2010, and the national ID card programme began as a pilot in Panchthar district and among Singha Durbar staff in 2009.
Sources: The Kathmandu Post
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
