By printing 2,800 passports a day against the regular 1,600, the Regional Passport Office (RPO), Bangalore, is hopeful of despatching all pending passports by April 15.
“Our personnel are working overtime and even on holidays. We will be able to clear the backlog by the end of April second week,” said Regional Passport Officer P.S. Karthigeyan.
This comes as a solace to the thousands of applicants who have not received their passports even weeks after completing the formalities at the Passport Seva Kendras (PSKs) in the State.
Due to short supply of blank booklets from India Security Press in Nasik, which meets the demand for passport booklets of all RPOs, ti-mely issue of passports to the applicants by the RPO, Bangalore, had been hit. “We have enough stock now,” he said and added that applicants can receive their passports quickly if they demonstrate their urgency to the RPO officials.
Due to the short supply of the booklets, passports were being printed and despatched only 40 days after the completion of police verification in December-January 2013-14. Now, they are being despatched in 20-25 days. “Once, the backlog is cleared, we will be able to go back to the normal cycle of despatching passports in 4-5 days, after the completion of police verification,” he said.
Meanwhile, the process of verification of addresses of applicants by the police, which is often cited by the RPO for the delay, came in for praise from Mr. Karthigeyan.
Now, there are 8,000 applications from across the State pending police verification for more than 21 days, he said and attributed the turnaround to the recently introduced incentive scheme for swift police verification. “A sum of Rs. 100 is paid to the police department for each verification completed within 21 days, and only Rs. 25 if it is later,” he said. He said that the RPO in Bangalore issued 4.26 lakh passports during the calendar year 2013, which is the second highest in the country after the RPO in Hyderabad. Th-ough March and April are the two months of the year when the number of applications for passports swell, Mr. Karthigeyan said that appointments for normal category are available for online booking on www.passportindia.gov.in round the clock in the four PSKs located on Lalbagh Road and at Marathahalli in Bangalore and in Hubli and Mangalore, which together account for 2,105 appointments per day, including 1,875 under the normal category. The remaining 230 appointments per day are reserved under Tatkal category, for which applicants book slots two days in advance at 6.30 p.m.
