Indians residing in India and abroad, who are holding hand-written passports as well as the 20-year passports with validity beyond November 24, 2015, have been requested to apply for re-issue of passports and obtain Machine Readable Passports (MRP) before November 24, 2015.
InvalidAccording to a release, those passports will become invalid as the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has by November 24, 2015, decided to phase out all non-machine readable passports. The result of this will be foreign governments denying visa to those travelling with a non-MRP. Issue of machine readable passports commenced from 2001 and all new Indian passports are ICAO-compliant MRP now.
