This system is skewed in favour of those who can afford to pay the higher charge.
KARACHI: This is with reference to a letter in your newspaper of April 4 by Muhammad Saleem Rehmani titled “Passport problems”. Several reports and letters have appeared in your newspaper on this matter. It seems that all those applicants who are paying Rs2,100 for a ‘regular’ passport are being given the document after a very long wait. However, those who are paying the Rs4,000 for ‘urgent’ delivery do not have to wait. Clearly, this system is skewed in favour of those who can afford to pay the higher charge.
To make life easy for the thousands of passport applicants who must be waiting for their travel document, why can’t the government introduce a feature on the passport office’s website which allows citizens to track the status of their application? At the very least, this will help save them several time-consuming trips to the passport office.
Of course, that leads to the other question: Who in the interior ministry will think of this? Usually, our government departments and ministries hardly think of implementing anything that helps the ordinary citizen.
Syed A Mateen
Published in The Express Tribune, April 9th, 2011.
