Passport mela again this weekend, but quicker processing doubtful

Several passport offices in the country, including in Bangalore, will conduct another ‘passport mela’ on June 30 and July 1.

While the move is being touted as an immediate step aimed at delivering passports quickly and in a hassle-free manner to citizens, there are contradictions in the statements emanating from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

The main promise of quick deliveries of passports by processing applications submitted at the mela is somewhat misleading. While the Additional Secretary of Consular and Passport and Visa (CPV) division, Basant Kumar Gupta, says all documents will be uploaded onto the system within 24 hours of submission, the reality states otherwise.

During the mela last week, 3,500 applications were accepted in the State. As of today, 700 of those applications have been uploaded into the system and only three have been verified.

This means only these three applications have been sent for police verification.
An official in the Bangalore office said they were looking at taking 10 weeks to verify the applications that would accumulate over two weekends of the passport mela.

Further, the Bangalore passport office issued a statement recently saying it was reverting to the previous system of issuing appointments 36 hours earlier, from July 2. For three months, the MEA had decided to issue appointments 15 days in advance.

However, this backfired, as 30 per cent of the applicants did not turn up, wasting the slots. As the results with the 36-hour window were much better, the officials decided to switch to the old system. Strangely, Raghavendra Shastry, officer on special duty to External Affairs Minister S M Krishna, has now declared that the window will, in fact, be extended to 30 days.

Shastry has also stated that police verification in Karnataka will be completed in seven days, along the lines of Uttarakhand, which implemented the rule recently. Talks are also on with the computer wing of the police department to implement the system.

However, reports from Uttarakhand tell a different story. Working under the strict deadline of seven days, the police have now resorted to issuing adverse police verification as they have no time to do a proper job.

Sources in the police department here say what they are proposing is actually cutting down the police verification to 20 days and not seven days. Even getting it down to 20 days is a matter of considerable tweaking of software used by the police and the TCS, who are the private partners of the MEA for the passport project.

Shastry admitted that backlog would be a problem as the mela would bring in more applications, but he promised that staff from other offices would be deputed. Crucial to the working of these plans is the co-operation of the passport employees union, which does not seem to be in a mood to work in seven-day shifts.

However, bait in the form of incentives and 1,500 promotions are now being used to convince them to work for the mela and the extra hours it would take to verify and upload the documents.  To combat the perpetual problem of staff shortage, approval for 350 more people has been obtained from the Ministry of Finance, according to Shastry.