After witnessing a massive demand for passports in the past few years, the Bengaluru Regional Passport Office (RPO), for the first time in 2016, saw only a marginal increase — less than one per cent — in the number of passports issued.
The calendar year 2014 recorded a 20.18 per cent increase in passports issued across Karnataka since 2013. The following year saw an increase of nearly 18 per cent. However, from January 1 to December 30, 2016, the Bengaluru RPO issued only 6.23 lakh passports compared with 6.18 lakh in 2015; a bare 0.81 per cent increase.
‘Majority have passports’
P.S. Karthigeyan, Regional Passport Officer, Bengaluru, attributes the decline to the fact that a majority of people across the State already have passports.
The Bengaluru RPO received as many as 6,30,390 applications this year, of which 6,20,719 were cleared.
