The Ministry of External Affairs will be awarding the Tamil Nadu and the Puducherry police with a “Certificate of recognition” to “acknowledge its outstanding work” in the implementation of the “mPassport police app”, a digital, tablet computer-based application for police verification of passport applications.
This was announced in letters by the Chief Passport Officer of the Ministry of External Affairs addressed to the Director General of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry Police, T.K. Rajendran and Sunil Kumar Gautam respectively.
Tamil Nadu was the first State in the country to implement the app across all police districts.
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In other States, the application has been implemented only in some major cities. By February 2018, all police districts in Tamil Nadu started using the app for the passport verification process.
Key step
Police verification is a key step in the passport issuance process. Prior to the use of the app, the paper-based system of communication between the Regional Passport Offices and police stations, besides the actual verification procedure, resulted in a significantly higher processing time and bureaucratic delay, thereby increasing the time needed to issue the passport.
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The mPassport police app has been implemented on a Tablet PC system that is made available to police officials in charge of conducting the verification. Following the application submission at the passport office, the police verification process is initiated digitally.
The mobile app helps the police official to conduct field visits to verify the applicant’s details.
The police official can record the verification results on the field visit itself. Once this is done, all verifications are submitted as a consolidated report via a web application used by the respective police station and then later approved.
If there are adverse reports, these are reviewed before further processing of the application.
The use of a digital and mobile app process has significantly reduced the waiting time for the verification process, data from police districts show.
A comparison between the average time taken for police verification across districts in May 2017 and May 2018 clearly shows the impact of the application.
Steep drop
Barring a few districts, almost everywhere else there has been a steep drop in the time taken to generate the verification reports.
In some districts, the waiting time in terms of number of days has dropped by more than 70% over the corresponding month last year.
P.K. Ashok Babu, the regional passport officer of RPO Chennai, said the digital project was implemented quickly by the police officials in the State.
The app had not just eased the verification process (and consequently the issuance of passports), but had also made it transparent and secure, he said.