A number of citizen-friendly steps are on the line to make passport applications, processing and issuance less cumbersome and less time consuming.
The proposed measures would also aim at weeding out middlemen completely from the passport process, claimed J P Singh, regional passport officer, Lucknow, at a conference here.
“We have proposed to the Union external affairs ministry (MEA) about setting up of passport facilitation centres for the benefit of applicants and to check middlemen and brokers,” said Singh.
The MEA has been working in tandem with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for the last two years to make passport regime people-friendly by setting up Passport Seva Kendras (PSK) in India.
Besides, a system for ‘pre-payment’ of fee is also being mulled to ensure that only genuine and needy passport applicants seek appointments at PSK. This would help in checking pile up backlogs.
Singh said communication had also been established with police department to speed up police verification of applicants.
At present, there are 77 PSK in India, wherein TCS handles the ‘front end’ processing involving dealing with applicants, conducting biometrics and digitisation of documents.
Later, the processing of applications, including police verification, and issuance of passports is handled by the passport offices. TCS has created a secured and centralised database and put in place a disaster recovery centre.
“We are constantly getting feedback to this unique public-private partnership (PPP) model from applicants and passport offices, which is helping us improve this technological platform,” TCS vice president and head (government industry solutions unit) Tanmoy Chakrabarty said.
He informed the same platform could be used for the future e-passport regime, to which India was a signatory. TCS said the platform was ‘flexible and scalable’ and subsequent versions would be incorporated with better solutions.
