Nepal’s Department of National Identity and Civil Registration is buying ten million Automated Biometric Identification System licences from the French company IN Groupe — the group that owns IDEMIA and Safran — without putting the purchase out to competition. The Kathmandu Post reported the decision this weekend after a June cabinet approval. The price is 0.0995 euros per licence, the same rate the supplier charged in 2019, which puts the ten million units at just under a million euros. The department is relying on Article 41 of the Public Procurement Act, the provision that permits direct purchase where only one supplier holds exclusive rights, or where proprietary goods must be bought from an existing supplier to keep a system compatible.
The argument for going direct
On its face the compatibility case is the strongest one available. Nepal’s biometric programme began in 2009; IDEMIA has supplied its passports since 2010, and the earlier ABIS licences came from Safran, which IN Groupe has since absorbed. A biometric matching system is not a commodity — the enrolled records, the templates and the matching engine are bound together, and re-tendering the licences on their own would mean either migrating a national identity database or running two incompatible systems side by side. That is the situation Article 41 exists for, and the licences were expiring, which the department says was already causing operational difficulty.
What is missing is the reasoning, not the decision
The criticism reported is narrower and harder to answer: officials have not set out publicly why direct procurement was the only route. That distinction matters, because the sole-supplier exemption is not self-executing — it requires the buyer to establish that no suitable alternative exists, and to record why. A decision can be entirely correct and still be unaccountable if the justification never leaves the building. The lock-in here was also foreseeable in 2019, when the cabinet approved expanding capacity to thirty million citizens; a competitive event, if one was ever going to happen, belonged at that point rather than at licence renewal.
And the record would not have told you either way
This is where the published trail runs out. Our record holds 3,495 Nepali notices going back to 2018, and not a single one of them carries a contract value. Not a low share — none. The procurement categories are similarly narrow: 2,506 of those notices are works and 987 are goods, against two classified as services, so a software licensing arrangement of this kind barely exists as a shape in the national record. The Department of National Identity and Civil Registration does not appear in our data at all; the parent Ministry of Home Affairs appears, but its last published notices are construction, storage hardware and a vehicle, all from 2018.
| Buyer | Department of National Identity and Civil Registration |
| Supplier | IN Groupe (France), parent of IDEMIA and Safran |
| Bought | 10,000,000 ABIS licences |
| Unit price | €0.0995, unchanged from 2019 |
| Route | Direct, under Article 41 of the Public Procurement Act |
| Approved | Cabinet, June 2026 |
| Supplier relationship since | 2010 (passports), earlier ABIS licences via Safran |
Why that combination is the real story
Take the two halves together. A national biometric system is being renewed without competition, under an exemption that requires written justification — and it is happening in a procurement system where the public record carries no prices at all, and where the buying department has no published footprint. Whether the direct award was right is a question a Nepali auditor can answer. Whether anyone outside government could have checked it independently is a question the record answers on its own, and the answer is no. The price of these licences is public today because a newspaper asked, not because the system discloses it.
The price of these licences is public today because a newspaper asked, not because the system discloses it.
WHY IT MATTERS
Identity infrastructure is the clearest example of procurement lock-in there is: the first award decides the next twenty years, because the data cannot be moved without moving the vendor. The moment to compete is at the original build, not at renewal, and by renewal the sole-supplier clause is usually telling the truth. For any buyer standing at the start of that road, the useful question is not who wins the first contract but what the exit looks like — and whether the answer is written down anywhere a citizen can read it.
Data: Otnox — live procurement intelligence across 56 markets. Basis: reporting by the Kathmandu Post on the cabinet decision, set against 3,495 Nepali notices in our own record, 2018-01-01..2026-07-24.
