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Govt eases passport issuance process PTI New Delhi Oct 3: As part of efforts to ease the passport issuance process, the government has exempted from police verification the renewal cases having no change of residential address even as it has decided to take stern action to end corrupt practices in the services. “For renewal of passports wherein there is no change of address of individuals, police verification has been done away with,” the Minister of State for External Affairs, Mr E Ahamed told PTI here. For tatkal (instant) passports, there are directions for issuance of passports without waiting for police verification report which can be obtained later, he said. Noting that a number of other modernisation plans were also afoot, he said these steps were aimed at reducing pendency of passport cases. As of August this year, more than 1,90,000 passport applications were still pending in various regional passport offices across the country. “Our aim is to reduce the pendency to zero within three months depending on furnishing of police verification reports,” Mr Ahamed said. Referring to the recent detection of corruption involving employees of passport offices as was indicative by a series of arrests, the minister said the government had taken a series view of prevalence of such practices. “We have issued strict instructions to passport offices to ensure that touts are removed from these premises,” he said. The Delhi police recently arrested a passport office employee as it smashed a gang engaged in managing passports on the basis of fake documents. Interestingly, several passports had been got issued in the name of one person having same address. The Central Bureau of Investigation carried out searches at various regional passport offices, especially in southern region, following information that travel documents were being issued on the basis of forged documents in connivance with certain passport officials. The CBI registered a case against five people and conducted searches at 11 places, including six residential premises of the accused officials. At least 146 references were mentioned in the complaint in which passports were issued on the basis of false and forged documents. On verification, it was found that in 54 cases, the allegations were true. Noting that obtaining of police verification was a difficult task, Mr Ahamed said the passport officers had been directed by the government to interact with police chiefs of the states. The government, in an effort to simplify passport issuance system, had set up a committee in March 2001 to review the process. The committee submitted its report in September 2001 and made several recommendations for simplification of procedures, decentralisation of the submission of passport applications to the district level through the establishment of district passport cells, and modernisation of passport offices.
