LAHORE, Feb 15: Passport offices will be closed next year as the Interior Ministry plans to utilize Nadra resources to issue computerized passports to applicants, Interior Minister Moinud Din Haider said on Friday.

Opening Nadra’s fast track facility here, he said efforts were being made to collect applications for passports at Nadra centres across the country and utilizing its database prepared during the 1998 census to confirm the authenticity of the information given by the applicants.

Currently, there were 28 regional passport offices working in the country.

Mr Haider said the cabinet had approved the design of the new machine-readable passports which would be up to the US standards and could not be tampered with. The first new passport would be ready within eight to 10 months, he added.

The ministry was also providing computers on all 28 entry and exit points to streamline and maintain the data about the people entering or leaving the country for an effective check on movement of terrorists, he said.

A pilot project in this regard had started working in Karachi two months ago and it would be expanded to all other points within a year, he added.

The immigration cell was also being re-organized as the government had terminated a number of employees having a bad repute, he said, adding womenfolk would be preferred for employment in the cell in future.

He said the ministry was also planning to use Nadra’s database for transfer of land and vehicles to check illegal occupation and forgery incidents. The Motor Vehicle Authority in Islamabad had been directed to prepare a plan in this regard, he added.

Commenting on the performance of Nadra, Mr Haider said the authority had so far prepared 4.5 million computerized cards and was delivering 100,000 of them daily.