No ‘ordinary’ passports issued since February 9

Thousands hit by travel delays as only ‘urgent’ passports being issued.

LAHORE:

The Interior Ministry has not issued a single non-urgent passport to applicants from regional and district offices since February 9, causing travel delays for thousands of people, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Lahore has two regional passport offices, each of which handles around 1,500 applications a day, 1,200 of them ordinary applications and 300 urgent.

According to the rules, ordinary passports are meant to be issued within 12 working days and urgent passports within five working days from the date of applying, at a cost of Rs2,100 and Rs4,000, respectively.

But a senior official told The Express Tribune that no passports sought on an ordinary application had been issued since February 9.

Officials in regional and district offices had reported receiving an avalanche of complaints about delays, he said.

Among the complainants were students who had missed the start of classes abroad, people seeking medical treatment, workers who had received job termination threats, and other passengers whose visas or tickets had expired because of the delays in the issuance of passports, said the official.

“People are basically being forced to apply for urgent passports if they want to get their passports without delay, which is unfair since that is twice as expensive as ordinary applications,” said the senior official.

Syed Riaz Shah, assistant director for passports, said the regional office was continuing to process applications and send them to headquarters in Islamabad. The delay, he said, was at the head office since that’s where the passports were printed and issued.

Demand for new passports is particularly high during the Hajj and Umra season, which started in early March.

The official said that there were no criteria for urgent applications other than that the applicant pay a higher fee. “They are not even asked why they are seeking urgent passports,” he said.

“There should be a criteria, for example if the applicant’s ticket or visa is about to expire or there is a student whose classes are about to begin. Allowing anyone to apply for an urgent passport creates an unnecessary burden.”

“Currently, the issuance of passports depends on the sweet will of the director for printing, because the printing mechanism is entirely selective,” he added.

Another senior official said the delay was owing to a shortage of lamination paper and ink at headquarters.

Irshad Ahmed Bhatti, director for printing, was not available for comment.

The Interior Ministry bought heavy machinery for the issuance of machine-readable passports in 2004 and installed it in Islamabad. The official said that since then, there had been rising demand for new passports, but no increase in capacity. “The printing quality has diminished as the installed machines were not maintained properly,” he added.

There are over a dozen regional passport offices in Punjab. Many of these are also suffering from resource and repair problems. Muhammad Aslam says he has visited the passport office on Abbot Road in Lahore four times to seek a passport. “Most of the computers, software and cameras there are out of order,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 5^th, 2011.