Bangladesh finally ushered in the new year by doing something it had been threatening to do for nearly seven years: enforcing a rule. The launch of the National Equipment Identity Register (NEIR) on January 1 was less a technological milestone and more a social experiment to see what happens when regulation collides with a business model built on creative evasions. The answer arrived swiftly, with bricks.
It is almost poetic that a system designed to identify mobile phones triggered such analog fury. Protest marches, road blockades, shuttered shops, vandalised buildings and flying brickbats accompanied the simple idea that a device connected to a national network should first prove it belongs there. One could argue this reaction alone explains why NEIR became necessary.
The mobile phone market in Bangladesh is vast and deeply embedded in daily life. With more than 180 million mobile connections and smartphones increasingly functioning as wallets, identity cards, classrooms and offices, the handset is no longer a luxury. It is infrastructure. Yet the market supplying this infrastructure has for years operated with a parallel economy that treated taxes, standards and consumer protection as optional extras.
By conservative industry estimates, at least one in three phones sold in recent years entered the country through unofficial channels. Less conservative estimates put that figure closer to half. These devices avoided import duties, VAT, compliance costs and often basic quality checks. The result was predictable. Prices dropped artificially, legitimate distributors lost market share, authorised retailers watched margins collapse and local assembly plants that had emerged after 2017 began to suffocate.
The irony is that Bangladesh had briefly got this right. Encouraged by policy support, global brands and local firms invested in assembly lines, logistics and service networks. By the 2021–22 fiscal year, official sales touched around 13 million units, creating jobs and generating revenue. Then came a tax restructuring that layered VAT across the supply chain. Production costs rose sharply. Consumers, unsurprisingly, drifted back to cheaper grey-market phones. By 2024–25, local production had fallen by roughly 35 percent. The informal market thrived. The formal one gasped.
The state, meanwhile, lost hundreds of crores in revenue annually. Money that could have paid for hospitals or schools quietly slipped through ports, borders and suitcases. NEIR was supposed to be the firewall against this leakage. Its logic is unremarkable. Every phone has an IMEI. Every SIM has an identity. If the two do not match a national registry, the network simply refuses service. Similar systems exist in India, Turkey, the UK and Australia. None of these countries collapsed into dystopian surveillance states because stolen or smuggled phones stopped working.
Yet in Bangladesh, NEIR was framed as everything from an anti-business conspiracy to a digital spy lurking inside people’s pockets. The fear narrative was powerful. A database that knows which phone uses which SIM, critics warned, could be misused. This anxiety is not entirely irrational in a country with a troubled history of digital governance. But conflating regulatory capability with inevitable abuse is a convenient way to avoid discussing the real issue: compliance.
NEIR does not read messages or listen to calls. It does not peer into social media accounts or bank apps. What it does is far more dangerous to certain interests. It disrupts anonymity in commerce. It makes it harder to sell devices that exist only because rules were ignored. It closes the loophole where a phone could be smuggled in the morning and activated by evening without ever troubling the taxman.
That is why the protests were not about privacy. They were about inventory. They were about unsold stock that could no longer be quietly pushed onto consumers. They were about a business ecosystem accustomed to negotiating deadlines into irrelevance.
The economic stakes behind this anger are significant. Grey-market dominance does not merely reduce government revenue. It erodes consumer rights. Phones sold unofficially often lack warranties, proper after-sales service and safety assurances. When they malfunction, consumers have little recourse beyond another purchase. This cycle benefits sellers of cheap devices while normalising disposability in a country already struggling with e-waste.
NEIR promises to interrupt this cycle. By blocking unregistered devices from networks, it nudges consumers toward legitimate channels. It also deters phone theft, since a stolen handset can be rendered useless nationwide. In a society where losing a phone increasingly means losing access to finances and identity, this is not a trivial gain.
The broader economic implications matter too. A predictable market attracts investment. Local assembly plants can expand only if they are not undercut by untaxed imports. Jobs in logistics, retail and servicing depend on a level playing field. Countries that implemented similar systems saw tangible results. Turkey reportedly reduced illegal handset usage dramatically and recovered substantial tax revenue. India used IMEI registration to curb counterfeits and support domestic manufacturing. Bangladesh is not reinventing the wheel. It is merely trying to stop it from rolling away unpaid for.
Of course, technology never exists in a vacuum. The concern that NEIR data could be misused sits within a wider context of expanding digital regulation. Recent ordinances on cybersecurity, data protection and governance have concentrated significant authority in the state. Without strong safeguards, oversight and transparency, any large database carries risk. The problem, however, is not NEIR itself but the legal ecosystem around it. Blaming a registry for hypothetical abuses while ignoring existing surveillance capacities is a selective outrage.
The real test will be implementation. Who can access NEIR data and under what conditions? How are decisions to block devices reviewed? What remedies exist for errors? These questions demand clear answers, not slogans. Judicial oversight, defined limits on data use and penalties for misuse are not luxuries. They are prerequisites for public trust.
What is striking is how quickly the conversation shifted from these substantive issues to street theatre. Shop closures were announced as if consumers would mourn the temporary absence of discounted phones. Roads were blocked, disrupting commuters who had nothing to do with handset imports. Families were brought to sit-ins, perhaps to underline the moral weight of selling unregistered devices. The state responded with batons, water cannons and tear gas, restoring traffic by afternoon and irony by evening.
The sarcasm writes itself. A country eager to digitise everything balked at digitising accountability. Traders who thrived on regulatory absence suddenly discovered a love for civil liberties. A market that undermined local industry protested in the name of livelihoods. And a regulator enforcing a long-delayed rule was treated like an invading force.
In the end, the launch of NEIR exposed an uncomfortable truth. Bangladesh’s digital economy has grown faster than its regulatory discipline. For years, enforcement was negotiable, deadlines elastic and rules provisional. NEIR marks a moment when the state decided, belatedly, that systems matter. That decision will inevitably hurt those who built fortunes in the gaps between policy and practice.
The writer is an Academic, Journalist, and Political Analyst
