Work was resumed only after their director, A. Khatua came down from the Ministry of External Affairs to sort things out. Fourteen touts were arrested during the CBI raid on Friday. This included one RPO daily wager, Sunil Kumar Bhushan, who was later released on bail. The CBI officials had also seized Rs 23,915.

During the raid, RPO employees were also searched. The employees are unhappy that the regional passport officer was not present on the scene when the raid happened.

To express their unhappiness at the manner in which the raid was conducted, the employees went on strike for the better half of the day.

For the five-odd hours that the counters at RPO remained unmanned, the crowds surging outside nearly came to blows.

Unhappy that there was no one to attend to them at the counters, all those in the long queues got into arguments and some were roughed up. Tempers ran high as striking employees negotiated with senior officials.

It all started around 10 a.m., when officials began deserting their counters, and people in line got restless. The entire staff walked up to the first floor office of the Regional Passport Officer K.M. Venugopalan demanding an explanation for Friday's raid.

Purushottam Lal, vice-president of the All India Passport Employees Association, says: ``We are not questioning what the CBI did. After all, they were doing their job. What is bothering us is that the RPO and the Assistant Passport Officer did not come down and stand by us.''

``They barged into my room alleging that I had prior information about the raid,'' says Venugopalan. ``On the contrary, I got to know about the raid only when the CBI officials came and told me. At that point it wasn't advisable to go down to the counters and interfere.'' The allegations and counter allegations went on for around four hours. ``I have been here since morning,'' says Neenu Datta. ``I need my passport urgently and in the morning I was told that I would get my papers in an hour. Ten minutes after that everyone stopped working. Since I just have to pick up the passport today, I'll just hang around till the paper work is done.''

Luckily for Datta, discussions between officials and employees worked out. Khatua assured the workers that he would look into the matter and the employees went back to work. At 12.30 p.m., the first few counters reopened. Everything was back to normal, much to the relief of the waiting people, by 1 p.m.