Foolproof passports issued in Trichy

As part of the ongoing efforts to issue passports with foolproof security measures, the Inspector General of Police (IG) Trichy Range, M Ramasubramanian, on Friday launched a new version in the city.

The document has several new features, including the ghost picture of the applicant along with the real one.

Regional Passport Officer (RPO) K Balamurugan said the use of fake passports will be minimised with the release of the latest document. Trichy Passport Seva Kendra (PSK) has already returned 80,000 old passports so that they could be replaced by the new ones. The old stock of passport at the PSK got exhausted on May 23.

IG Ramasubramanian assured all help in the transparent issue of the passports through a foolproof system and said that with the latest technology upgrade, the counterfeiting was rendered almost impossible. The IG also informed that the police had cleared 82,415 passport verifications in the last financial year. Senior citizens (those above 65 years), minors and government employees do not require verification by the police.

The Trichy PSK now operates with 67 permanent staff, including nine officers who clear as many as 120 applications a day, and 70 under the public-private partnership. The office issues upwards of 1,45,000 passports a year and hence it urgently require three more officers, said an official.

As the new passport is double laminated, the chances of contents getting smudged were remote, said a passport officer. Of the 77 Passport Seva Kendras (PSK) in the country, Trichy is considered sensitive because of the concentration of large number of Sri Lankan refugees in the region and the susceptibility of the PSK to the imaginative wrongdoings of the greedy touts has been a felt issue.

Meanwhile, the contentious issue of whether the passport applicants should be summoned to the jurisdictional police station for verification is not yet resolved. The RPO K Balamurugan had conducted seven meetings with the police officers in the region, but in the absence of a clear-cut notification from a senior level police officer, the inspectors and sub-inspectors are a confusion lot. The RPO argued that the women and children should not be summoned to the police station in the name of verification, but police insisted that they have to take the fingerprints of the applicants for their own record. The police commissioner Shailesh Kumar Yadav held the view that it was not possible for the police to visit all the remote areas for the verification, and with the limited staff and paucity of fuel allowance it was an uphill task.

However, IG Ramasubramanian has assured Balamurugan that he would help the PSK by trying to finish police verifications within the government-stipulated 21 days from the date of online application. Now, the police takes 55 days for the verification of a passport. Balamurugan said the system of online application for passports and personal appearance for biometric registration have plugged the loopholes to the extent of 50% and the rest of the 50% should be kept in check by spot verification by police. "Though we do 100% work, the 50% has to be complemented by the police," Balamurugan said.

Since the middlemen were kept at bay after the introduction of the online application system, the approved Travel Agents Association had moved the Madurai bench of the Madras high court. It cited a circular from the Ministry of External Affairs that stated: "An applicant who has difficulty in filling up/online filling up of passport application form or wants to enquire about the status of his application may seek assistance from travel agents in the new Passport Seva Project. Therefore, travel agents may still play a role to that extent in the new passport seva project."

Senior counsel Nalini Chidambaram had argued for the travel agents, and the court finally disposed of the petition. "The members of the petitioner association can only play the role as per the government circular. However, such (travel agent-guided) applicant has to come to the PSK for submission of application, fingerprint and digitalisation of photograph requirements and the travel agents will have no role in that process," the court remarked.

As the role of touts and middlemen, who used to exploit ignorant passport applicants, were curtailed, the retired defence personnel are now uploading the online application for a nominal fee of Rs 50.