Getting passport from Coimbatore Regional Passport office will be easy as the time consuming process of police verification will go digital soon. With this, police verification which used to take around 20 days or more will be completed in three to four days.
Under the new initiative, each police station is expected to get a tab which will have an application to do the verification digitally.
“The police department has already purchased tabs to be used for the digital verification process. They are expected to reach stations soon. This will ease the police verification process as nothing will have to be done on paper,” said Regional Passport Officer G. Sivakumar, who assumed charge on Monday. Mr. Sivakumar said that he will request West Zone IG to conduct training programme for the police to use to the tab and the application for digital verification.
The application installed in the tabs will have all the forms that were used for police verification in digital format. Once cleared by the police in the field level, they will be cross checked by senior police officers in charge of the process before sending it to the Regional Passport Officer. Officers involved in the process will use digital signatures to clear each step.
“The digital verification was done on a pilot basis at Vepery police station in Chennai. It was a success. We hope that even the concept of tatkal application will become obsolete when digital verification becomes fully functional,” said Mr. Sivakumar. He said that efforts are being made to set up Post Office Passport Seva Kendra in Tirupur and Namakkal districts. Refuting rumours on the closure of the Regional Passport Office, Mr. Sivakumar said a land construction of new building is under the consideration of the Department for which land will have to identified. Currently, the Department is spending
In 2017, the Regional Passport Office which covers Coimbatore, the Nilgiris, Tirupur, Erode, Namakkal and Salem districts issued 1,73,147 passports from the total number of 1,82,751 applications received in normal, tatkal and miscellaneous categories.
