Passport Seva Kendras (PSKs) were set up to speed up the process of issuing passports, but the new facility and police are making the wait longer for passport seekers. Police have received 9,000 requisitions this year (up to March 1), but so far completed verification of antecedents of only 3,000 applicants, making other passport-seekers to run from pillar to post.
L Ashwani Reddy, a resident of Baghamberpet, was planning to take Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in March. As passport details have to be filed in the GRE registration process, she applied for passport online and submitted necessary documents at PSK, Begumpet two months ago. However, till date police verification has not happened.
Similarly, Razia Begum, a resident of Humayunnagar, applied for a passport in January, hoping to undertake Umrah with her group in March-April, but so far police did not complete the verification process, crucial for issuing the travel document.
In 2011, police had received 1.20 lakh requisitions for police verification and of them 1.18 lakh were cleared. While launching the five PSKs in the state in November, 2011, Regional Passport Office (RPO), Hyderabad had promised citizens passports quickly as police verification would go online. However, the reality seems to be far from that.
The Hyderabad police and their Cyberabad counterparts, who between them process about 17,000 passport applications every month, are still carrying out verification in the old-fashioned way, manually.
Special Branch (SB) sleuths of the two commissionerates, who are entrusted with the police verification process, claim that after PSKs were launched, the issue of Personal Particular Form (PPF) for verification became slow and between January 5 and February 5 not a single PPF was sent for clearance.
One of the features of the Passport Seva Project, under which PSKs were set up, was to link police headquarters of 18 districts with RPO, Hyderabad for online PPF clearance. Once data is uploaded by RPO staff on its portal, SB personnel download the particulars, carry out verification and after endorsing it by an official of the rank of inspector or above by his/her digital signature, enabling the RPO to print the passport.
Courtesy: TOI