News
E-passport tender: Award of Rs. 5.5bn contract imminent
View(s):The Department of Immigration and Emigration (DIE) has reportedly announced its “intention to award” the tender for a Rs. 5.5bn contract to personalise its upcoming e-passport consignments.
While the name of the winning bidder has not been publicly released, authoritative sources revealed it to be Thales DIS Finland OY and its Sri Lankan partner, Just In Time (JIT) Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. The procurement appeals process will begin next week, where unsuccessful parties will challenge the award.
The successful bidder must implement a two-key encryption solution which will allow the Sri Lankan passport’s unique public key infrastructure (PKI) to be lodged with the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s (ICAO) public key directory (PKD) for access by immigration authorities worldwide.
A separate procurement for e-Passport books was earlier won by the Thales-JIT joint venture. But a large quantity of that order continues to be delivered as ordinary machine-readable passports (MRPs) to tide over a severe shortage of travel documents caused by the e-passport tender being bungled.
The personalisation (PKI-PKD) solution was advertised as a separate procurement.
Meanwhile, the Department for Registration of Persons (DRP) has extended for a third time the bid submission deadline for the procurement of five million preprinted polycarbonate cards for national identity cards under the government’s electronic NIC (e-NIC) project.
The e-NIC initiative is distinct and separate from the proposed Indian government-funded digital identity card project, where procurement is also ongoing for an Indian-developed MOSIP (modular open-source identity platform). The DRP is in parallel continuing to issue polycarbonate cards which feature a 12-digit number starting with the birth year.
The department first advertised a tender for 15 million polycarbonate cards in September 2025. It re-advertised the tender the following month after amending the requirement to five million cards. It published the tender again in December last year, with the closing date specified as January 22, 2026.
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