Travel woes: Top official says passports backlog will be cleared by June 15

1.5 million laminates procured, backlog of citizens abroad already cleared.

ISLAMABAD:

In an eagerly awaited development, Pakistani expatriates will now be able to receive their passports after the backlog, created due to the unavailability of laminates – the specially designed paper used for making passports – was cleared for all foreign missions abroad.

Briefing the media on the crisis, Dr Zulfiqar Ahmed Cheema, the director general of immigration and passports, said on Monday that all passports have been printed and shipped to respective countries.

“The immigration and passport department has procured 1.5 million laminates, and now the staff is working on a war footing to clear the backlog of passports in the country by June 15,” Cheema said.

“The backlog of ‘urgent passports’ will be cleared by the end of May and we are confident that by June 15 all passports, including regular, will be cleared,” he added. “The staff is now churning out 20,000 passports a day.”



So far, 400,000 passports are in the backlog, half of them urgent ones. A department official said that by mid-April the backlog had reached 800,000. At the time, the passport department was left with only 90,000 laminates.  The number of pending travel documents was reduced only after the department managed to procure 300,000 laminates in damages from the original supplier.

Subsequently, with the crisis reaching unmanageable proportions, a special permission was secured from the prime minister to procure another 1.5 million laminates through the US based supplier OpSec.

One of the reasons for the clearing up of the process has been the removal of a stay order by the Islamabad High Court on a tender for the new contract with OpSec.

The court had earlier stayed the contract process after one of the bidders, a French company Reliance International, challenged that OpSec was given the tender in violation of rules and without laboratory tests.



“In fact all legal procedures were met. Reliance’s rates were at least 1.6 million dollars higher than the price OpSec offered,” said a senior officer from the Machine Readable Passports (MRP) Project. The price for the total contract awarded to OpSec was 3.4 million dollars. The supplier has provided lamination paper twice before in two different contracts, the official added.

Speaking about the department’s priority list, Cheema said that preparation of passports for Hajj pilgrims would be completed in the first week of June. He said the fresh applications were also being entertained and the process was expected to be back to normal once the backlog was cleared.

Furthermore, reaching out to waiting citizens, the director general warned against giving money to any agents. “We are taking strict action against all touts and agents,” said Cheema, reassuring citizens that their passport woes would soon be over.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 21^st, 2013.