The demand for passports may have gone down, but the overall time taken to get the document in hand stood at 23 days. This is because the average time taken for police verification is well over the 21-day window. Police verification is not necessary in a few cases, such as for re-issue of passports.
The average time taken for police verification across Karnataka is 25 days, going up to nearly 60 days in some districts, defeating the Bengaluru Regional Passport Office’s (RPO) aim to bring down the time taken to dispatch passports to 10 days.
Variations
There are large variations, however, in the number of days taken for police verification for passports in different districts of the State. Ten district police headquarters performed better than the State average.
Bengaluru city, which saw the introduction of technological interventions such as the ‘mPassport Police’ app, which cuts down on several processes in the verification procedure, had the best average among all districts with 13 days. Gadag, Udupi, Dharwad and Bagalkot were the others where the time taken to complete police verification was less than the State average.
The low performers included districts which took an average time of as much as 59 days (Bengaluru Rural) to complete the verification procedure.
Karnataka has ranked low in performance on this front, having completed less than half the total number of police verification requests made under the Bengaluru RPO the previous financial year. The completion rate was much higher in the RPOs in Hyderabad (97 per cent) and New Delhi (93 per cent).
