Tripura to have passport office by Jan 2016: MEA

The office will be a great benefit for those from the state wishing to get a passport for which they had to wait for several months

The Passport Office at Agartala is likely to be operationalise by early next year, said an senior official of the Ministry of External Affairs on Monday.

"Towards the end of this month or in the early weeks of January itself, so it's going to operationalise very soon," said A K Sobti, Director, Passport Seva Project (PSP).

The PSP will be a great benefit for those from the state wishing to get a passport for which they had to wait for several months as passports were being issued from Kolkata.

Recently hundreds of handwritten passports became invalid after they were replaced by machine readable passports as of November 24th last year.

"Handwritten passports have been banned as per the requirement of the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). Now, they will not be accepting manual passports anywhere across the world. So it is in the interest of the applicant or the citizens that they should go for MRZ (machine readable zone) passports so that they are not put to any harassment." Sobti added.

Sobti along with V K Jain, another official of the MEA, arrived here today to review the work of the mini Passport Seva Kendra prior its inauguration.

The mini Passport Seva Kendra is being set up in Agartala to facilitate delivery of passports.

The Tripura government has written a letter requesting the Centre to set up a Passport office in Agartala.

In the entire northeastern region, there is only one passport office in Guwahati and one Passport Seva Kendra in Manipur. The Kolkata Regional Passport office controls the Tripura Passport Seva.