New passport project to make work easier

For the Regional Passport Office RPO in Kolkata, crippled by less space and lack of infrastructure, the Passport Seva Project is a welcome one. The state will have five Passport Facilitation Centres PFCs which will function as independent, autonomous passport offices. The main PFC will be in Kolkata and a new one will be set up in Behrampore. The existing passport offices in Siliguri and Kharagpur and the Branch Secretariat in Kolkata will be upgraded to a PFC.

Each PFC will support activities like biometric capture, photograph, payment and verification. As of now, the Kolkata RPO receives on an average 1,200 to 1, 500 applications daily. In spite of the 10 to 12 per cent growth in the volume of applications, the number of counters remained at 10.

For the week ending October 13, the number of passports waiting to be issued at Kolkata office stood at 3,000. In fact, the RPO Kolkata has around 11,412 objectionable cases at its disposal. This includes applications which are incomplete or incorrect information. Another 25,000 cases are pending in which Kolkata RPO is awaiting verification reports from the police. This delay is particularly acute in border districts like North 24-Parganas.

To issue new passports, the Kolkata RPO takes an average of 25 days to issue new passports and on an average, the office issues 900 passports daily.

Despite the overwhelming number of applications, the RPO operates at one-third of the stipulated requirement of space. 8220;Ideally, there should be more counters but the lack of space is so acute that our hands are tied,8221; said Chattopadhyay.

The authorities are hopeful that the PSP will take care of a number of such problems.