The country is planning to introduce express passport service by which an applicant can get the passport in a few hours on the same day. It will be a step ahead of the tatkal passport service, which provides the passport within a week.
Regional Passport Officer P. Ramakrishnan said here on Monday that modalities were being chalked out at a higher level for the express passport scheme.
Police verification is the biggest hurdle facing the Regional Passport Office here, chosen the best passport office in the country in the ‘B’ category. Offices issuing more than 1.5 lakh but less than three lakh passports a year are placed in the ‘B’ category.
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Mr. Ramakrishnan, who accepted the award from Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj in New Delhi on Friday, said he could achieve zero-pendency and next-day processing in Malappuram because of the hard work and coordination of his staff members.
Police verification
“Police verification continues to be the biggest challenge in Malappuram,” he said. The number of applications awaiting police verification in Malappuram is so huge that it can match that of a large State such as Karnataka,” he said.
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About 24,000 passport applications could not yet be processed in time because of the delay in police verification, he said.
“We have such huge pendency only in the North-Eastern States. The entire State of Karnataka has as many cases pending as our district,” he said, adding that efforts were on to speed up the process. “We have taken up the matter at the higher level of the Police Department,” he said.
Mr. Ramakrishnan said the passports being issued now would be double-stitched.
“The External Affairs Ministry is insisting on quality. We decided to go for quality booklets following complaints of damage,” he said.
He denied the move to amalgamate the Malappuram and Kozhikode passport offices. “There is no such move. In fact, Malappuram alone has good demand, even after detaching Palakkad district from under its purview,” he said.
Malappuram gets the award for the best passport office in the country in ‘B’ category.