Getting a passport will be lot easier soon

Forget long queues and the endless wait for your passport.

You may soon get a new passport within three days of police verification and on the same day under 'tatkal' scheme, a promise made by Ministry of External Affairs as it signed an agreement with Tata Consultancy Services appointing them as the service provider for issuing passports.

Taking steps to make passport service more people friendly, the MEA aims to nearly quadruple the number of passport counters to 1,250 from the current 345 and bring the entire process of issuing the travel document on-line.

Under the project, applicants will get new passports within three days of police verification while under the tatkal scheme the travel document will be made available to the applicant on the same day.

TCS will open 77 new Passport Seva Kendras across the country by January 2010 which will be fully computerised. The tedious job of police verification too would be done on-line and a secure network is being set up for the purpose.

Bangalore and Chandigarh will be the first to get the new Passport Seva Kendras by June 2009 which will be functional on a pilot basis.

The MEA has outsourced support functions like improving citizen interface, managing technology and call centres training to TCS.

Sovereign duties like security-related functions, verifying documents and decision on granting of the passport will be done by the government staff, Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said.

The Central Passport Organisation issued over 50 lakh (5 million) passports last years and the number is likely to double in the next three years.

Printing and dispatching of passports will be taken care of by the government staff who will function from the present 37 passport offices which will be converted into Passport Back Offices.

The new system will also do away with the manual exchange of information with the police and establish electronic linkages of the district police headquarters with the Passport Seva Portal.

Government will own all strategic assets including the data centre, database and the application software and the entire system will have strict access controls incorporating biometrics, an MEA official said.

MEA plans to issue e-passports to all applicants by September next year and the biometric information of passport seekers will be recorded when the pilot project becomes operational.

Once fully implemented, re-issue of passports, change in name and other personal details will be done within three working days. Passport offices will remain open for public for seven hours as against four hours at present.

The project seeks to ensure that the applicant spends not more than 45 minutes at the passport office, which are expected to be customer friendly and more comfortable than the present ones.

The MEA had conceived the project about two years back and got the go ahead from the Union Cabinet in September last year.

Following a comprehensive open tender project, TCS had emerged as the best value bidder and was appointed service provider for the project.