ISLAMABAD, 19 December (IRIN) - Over a million Afghans living in Pakistan have been registered in a drive to provide them with official identification for a three-year period, UN officials said on Tuesday.

After an initial slow start in mid-October, the registration campaign has accelerated in recent weeks, with over 1,030,000 Afghans having registered with Pakistani authorities.

"With just two weeks to go before the exercise ends on 31 December, as many as 28,000 Afghans are being registered daily in some 50 static and mobile registration across the country," Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman at the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

The US $6 million exercise is a follow-up to a comprehensive Afghan census conducted in Pakistan in February and March 2005, which found more than 3 million Afghans were still living in the country. Only Afghans counted in the last year's census can take part in registration.

Countrywide, over 631,000 Afghans have registered in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), some 174,000 in Balochistan, about 122,000 in Punjab, around 67,000 in Sindh and more than 6,000 in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. Some 48 percent of those registered are females, whereas another 51 percent are under the age of 14.

Pakistan's National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) is conducting the exercise, using fingerprint biometrics and photos to record information through fixed and mobile registration centres across the country with the support of the government's Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees (CAR) and the UN refugee agency.

This first ever official documentation of Afghans in exile seeks to profile the Afghan population in Pakistan in an effort to search for durable solutions, according to UNHCR officials.

Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency has been discussing with the government a possible extension in deadline of 31 December in order to register as many of the Afghans counted in 2005 as possible. However, a final decision is not expected until sometime next week.

Another tripartite meeting between Islamabad, Kabul and UNHCR has also been scheduled for the second half of January 2007 to further discuss the new Afghan repatriation assistance programme due to start in March 2007.

More than 2.8 million Afghan refugees have returned from Pakistan since 2002 under a UNHCR-assisted voluntary repatriation programme that ended on 14 October after five years.

TS/JL/DS

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