By Nizam Ahmed

BOYRA, Bangladesh, March 16 (Reuters) - Bangladesh is set to have a fair election this year with a new voters' list replacing one critics said had millions of fake names, an official of the U.N. agency funding voter registration said on Sunday.

Bangladesh is to hold elections by the end of 2008 under a "road map" set out by the army-backed interim government, which has ruled under a state of emergency since taking charge in January, 2007 following months of political violence.

"We have trust in Bangladesh that a credible democratic election will be held by the end of the year," Kemal Dervis, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told reporters.

Dervis, who arrived in Dhaka on Saturday on a three-day visit, was speaking after observing the registration process at a centre in Boyra, a remote village 320 km (200 miles) south of the capital Dhaka.

The UNDP has been channelling a $50 million fund from nine donors to the Bangladesh government to create the new voter list and issue registration cards with photographs to cut fraud.

"The way -- with modern technology -- the voters' list is being prepared, there is every ground to believe that the election will be fair, free and credible," he said.

Some 70,000 voter registrars fanned out across the country in June last year to create the new electoral roll. The election commission, in cooperation with the army, is preparing the list.

Brigadier-General Shahadat Hossain Chowdhury, briefing Dervis at the voter registration centre, said so far more than 55 million voters had been registered and 59 percent of the total task had been completed.

More than 1,000 women and men queued up at the centre to be photographed and registered. The scheme is also for national identity cards.

The previous voters' list with 91.4 million voters prepared in 2006 had more than 12 million fake voters, according to the U.S. National Democratic Institute.

The interim government cancelled elections due on Jan. 22, 2007, launched an anti-corruption drive and pledged to hold a fair poll by the end of 2008. More than 170 people, including former prime ministers Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, who ended her five-year term in October 2006, have been arrested. (Editing by Charles Dick)

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