The recent decision of the centre to hand over the Rs 1000-crore Passport Seva Project (PSP) to the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will greatly reduce the delay in getting passport, as police will be able to submit the verification reports online.

“Issuing of passports requires 10 to 12 stages which involve clerical work. This delay in processing could be trimmed with this new service,” said R Chattopadhyay, Acting Regional Passport Officer.

For the Regional Passport Office (RPO) in Kolkata, crippled by less space and lack of infrastructure, the Passport Seva Project is a welcome one. The state will have five Passport Facilitation Centres (PFCs) which will function as independent, autonomous passport offices. The main PFC will be in Kolkata and a new one will be set up in Behrampore. The existing passport offices in Siliguri and Kharagpur and the Branch Secretariat in Kolkata will be upgraded to a PFC.

Each PFC will support activities like biometric capture, photograph, payment and verification. As of now, the Kolkata RPO receives on an average 1,200 to 1, 500 applications daily. In spite of the 10 to 12 per cent growth in the volume of applications, the number of counters remained at 10.

For the week ending October 13, the number of passports waiting to be issued at Kolkata office stood at 3,000. In fact, the RPO Kolkata has around 11,412 objectionable cases at its disposal. This includes applications which are incomplete or incorrect information. Another 25,000 cases are pending in which Kolkata RPO is awaiting verification reports from the police. This delay is particularly acute in border districts like North 24-Parganas.

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