'Passport Seva Project' to be rolled out in January

After much dilly-dallying, the ‘Passport Seva Project’, which aims at expediting the process of issuance of passport by digitising the passport services, would be rolled out by early 2010.

Talking to mediapersons on the sidelines of a CII show, MoS for External Affairs Preneet Kaur maintained that the project could be rolled out between January and March 2010 from Bangalore, followed by Chandigarh and Ludhiana.

The Rs 1,000-crore project, the e-governance project of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) that aims at providing passport-related services to the people in speedy and convenient manner, allotted to TCS in 2008, was slated to be launched in July 2009. But it got delayed. Kaur maintained there might have been some software-related issues that had to be sorted out for which the project got delayed..

The ‘Passport Seva Project’ aims at speeding the process of issuance of passport to three days (subject to police verification) and issuing passport under the ‘tatkal’ scheme within the same day.