Efforts underfoot to eradicate passport backlog by mid-June: Official

Immigration and Passport Director General claims backlog halved to 400,000 after laminates are procured.

ISLAMABAD: The government on Monday claimed that the massive passport backlog will be eradicated by mid-June after securing 1.5 million laminates.

Till mid-April, as many as 800,000 applicants were waiting for their new passports since the authorities had run out of the laminates and a court order suspended the government from procuring new ones from its designated supplier.

But the Director General Immigration and Passports (I&P) Dr Zulfiqar Ahmed Cheema in a media briefing on Monday said that all passports pending for months with the department due to lamination crisis have been printed and shipped to respective countries.

The backlog has been halved on the national front too with only four hundred thousand passports pending printing. This, Cheema hoped, would be completely eradicated by June 15, pointing out that his department was printing 20, 000 passports a day.

Laminate is the specially designated paper used for passports. By mid-April the backlog had reached 800, 000 while the passport department was left with only 90, 000 laminates.

However, the department managed to reduce the backlog as the department managed to recover 300, 000 laminates in damages. Then, after the court relaxed its stay order, it was able to order another 1.5 million laminates from it US supplier OpSec after securing a special permission from Prime Minister.