High-level meeting: Minister wants passport backlog cleared in a week

Officials informed that passports were not being issued on time because paper supplies ran short.

ISLAMABAD:

Interior Minister Rehman Malik has given officials a week to clear a heavy backlog of undelivered passports and constituted a committee to probe the delay.

At a high-level meeting which discussed the issuance of Machine Readable Passports (MRPs), passport authorities informed that that over 230,000 passports could not be prepared on time owing to non-availability of paper. Passport offices across the country can together produce 20,000 passports daily, but instead deliver only 6,000-7,000, officials told the meeting.

Taking strict notice of inconvenience caused to travellers, Malik, in a statement, asked officials to run three shifts at the Passport Headquarters in Islamabad and clear the backlog within a week. He also ordered an inquiry team to further probe the backlog.

Furthermore, the meeting was informed that 12 passport offices abroad already had the required system to deliver MRPs. These offices were in Ottawa, Kuala Lumpur, Damascus, Madrid, Sydney, Bradford, Tashkent, Washington DC, Athens, Vancouver, The Hague and Houston.



The interior minister asked the director general of immigration and passports to ensure that these 12 offices are operational by the end of December.

He also approved 23 new passport offices in Italy (Milan), South Africa (Pretoria), Afghanistan (Kabul), Denmark (Copenhagen), China (Beijing), Hong Kong (Hong Kong), Belgium and Luxemburg (Brussels), Japan (Tokyo), South Korea (Seoul), Jordan (Amman), Iran (Tehran), Singapore (Singapore), Thailand (Bangkok), Austria (Vienna), Philippines (Manila), Egypt (Cairo), Bangladesh (Dhaka), Sri Lanka (Colombo), Nigeria (Abuja), Turkey (Istanbul), Brazil (Brasilia), Libya (Tripoli) and Brunei Darussalam. These offices are to be completed by January 2013.

Promotion of female FIA officials

Rehman decried the fact that as many as 120 female officials of the Federal Investigation Agency had not been considered for promotion despite serving for ten years. In this regard, he said that equal opportunities must be given to both male and female employees.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2012.