The Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education in Faisalabad has made fingerprint verification compulsory for students of matriculation and intermediate classes, adding a biometric check to the registration process from the 2026-28 academic session onwards. The decision means that no student in the board’s jurisdiction will be able to complete registration without first having their fingerprints recorded and matched against the board’s records.
The board announced the change on Saturday, saying it was acting on instructions from the Punjab government and the controlling authority that oversees the province’s examination boards. Biometric verification will now sit at the heart of the student registration process, rather than being treated as an optional extra.
According to a spokesperson for the board, its information technology department has already updated the online registration portal so that it can handle the new verification system. Schools and colleges affiliated with the board have been told to arrange the equipment needed to carry out the process, including SecuGen HU20-A fingerprint readers and laptops or computers on which the scans can be taken and uploaded.
The board has been equally clear about what happens if the process is not completed. Students who fail to undergo biometric verification will have their admissions withheld, which means they will not be able to sit the board’s examinations. Responsibility for making sure every student is verified will rest with the school or college concerned, and the board has said the institution will be held accountable if the process is left incomplete.
The new requirement will apply to matriculation and intermediate candidates registered with BISE Faisalabad from the 2026-28 academic session. That covers pupils in classes nine and ten, who sit the Secondary School Certificate examinations, as well as students in classes eleven and twelve, who sit the Higher Secondary School Certificate examinations. In practical terms, the change will touch almost every teenager in the four districts that fall under the board’s jurisdiction.
Those districts are Faisalabad, Chiniot, Jhang and Toba Tek Singh, which together make up Faisalabad Division in central Punjab. The board itself is one of the older examination bodies in the province. It was established in 1988 and is one of nine boards across Punjab that operate under the Punjab Boards Committee of Chairmen.
The move towards fingerprints is part of a wider shift in how examination boards in Pakistan try to keep their records straight. Impersonation, in which one person sits an examination in place of another, has long been one of the problems that boards in the country try to guard against, and a fingerprint taken at registration gives the board a way of checking, at a later stage, that the person claiming a result is the person who registered for it. Names alone are a poor way of telling one candidate from another, since two pupils can share a name and a father’s name, and clerical errors in spelling can create duplicate entries. A fingerprint is unique to the individual, and once it is tied to a registration number the board has a fixed point of reference that does not depend on how a name was typed into a form.
Even so, the change will bring practical challenges, and the first of them will fall on the schools themselves. A fingerprint reader is not expensive by the standards of school equipment, but buying one for every institution, along with a laptop or computer to run it, still costs money, and it has to be installed, tested and maintained. Smaller institutions in the rural parts of Jhang, Toba Tek Singh and Chiniot may find the adjustment harder than city schools. The board has given institutions the responsibility for completing the process, but it has not said publicly whether any financial help will be offered to those that need to buy equipment.
The board will also need to answer questions about how the fingerprint data itself is kept. Biometric information is more sensitive than a name or a roll number, because it cannot be changed if it is misused. The board has said the portal has been updated to support verification, but it has not yet explained in public how the fingerprint records will be stored, who will have access to them, or how long they will be kept once a student has finished their examinations.
For now, the immediate task for schools and colleges in Faisalabad, Chiniot, Jhang and Toba Tek Singh is a straightforward one. They must bring their students in for scanning and make sure that no one is left unverified when registration closes. Students, for their part, should treat the fingerprint session as part of enrolment itself, not as an afterthought, because the board has made the consequence plain. Without the verification, there will be no admission, and without admission there will be no examination. Examination boards are under steady pressure to make their systems harder to manipulate and easier to trust, and biometric checks are one of the few tools that address both problems at once.
