New Indpress

Bangalore, Jan 15: The new guidelines for passport applications that have come into effect from Dec 26, 2006 have certainly made life easier for applicants who need not wait for a long time due to relaxed police verification procedures.

Fresh applications will be processed immediately and verification will be done at a later stage.

Even passports issued under the Tatkal scheme will be issued faster, provided the applicant pays Rs 2,500 (Rs 1,000 application fee plus Rs 1,500 for Tatkal) and gives three documents out of 14 listed and a verification certificate. One of these has to be a photo id. No proof of urgency is required either.

Says Regional Passport Officer (Bangalore) P Kumaran: “The three documents that have to be provided are non-discriminatory. Earlier, people had to run around Government offices trying to obtain the documents. Now they can provide voter’s id, driver’s license and a PAN card, which are not dependent on external agencies. We are also trying to cut down on middlemen and touts who make money by providing fake urgency proofs and some officials who take money by issuing fake documents.”

In Bangalore, it takes only about 30 days to obtain a fresh passport. The wait for passports for Bangalore applicants might not diminish significantly, but those from outer districts like Bidar and Haveri will get their passports quicker since police verification in the earlier method was delaying the process.

The flip side of the new guidelines is that the passport offices have to rely entirely on their internal database for any discrepancies in the applications.

About 1.31 lakh applications were received in Bangalore Urban district alone in 2006. This staggering number means that the number of applications processed per day amounts roughly to about 1,100 applications.

These databases do not provide any information about criminal cases filed against a person already possessing a passport. Without any police verification, the passport offices might end up clearing applicants who have provided false information or have criminal records.

A possible solution, suggests Kumaran is linking databases with other departments like Civil Supplies and the Police Department. “We are also updating our own servers as well. It would help if the police department automatically checks if an arrested person owns a passport.”

Presently details are being ironed out, as many issues are still contentious. The list of verifying officers has expanded, giving rise to fears that it will be easier to obtain spurious verification certificates and the number of required id’s decreasing to three, the enterprising counterfeit industry may also flourish.