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| March 10, 2003 | Monday | Muharram 6, 1424 |
Passport office needs its own building
PESHAWAR, March 9: The regional passport office is to the day functioning in a rented building since it was set up in early 1960s and is also short of staff, despite the fact that it contributes Rs180 million annually to the national kitty.
The office, which covers five districts including Peshawar, Charsadda, Mardan, Nowshera and Swabi and two tribal agencies — Khyber and Mohmand — is presently working in a single-storey building at the Charsadda road.
“We keep shifting the office every three or four years, but the concerned ministry has yet to construct a proper building to house the office. The interior ministry could have built its own building with the revenue it generates in a year, but it didn’t,” an official said.
The regional passport office receives more than 1,000 visitors daily, according to official figures, but one wonders to see the shabby building.
Official sources said that regional office generated Rs15 million per month, in spite of
it the interior ministry had failed to construct a permanent building, provide sufficient staff especially calligraphers and other basic facilities to visitors.
“We had the same number of staff, when the regional passport office was established four decades ago. So far, the ministry has provided only one fax machine and a computer,” said an official.
The sources said that nearly 600 passports were issued daily, while a large number of Afghans and other foreigners also visited the office for visas’ extension.
Visitors have to queue up for hours in a dusty veranda to submit application forms and get fresh passports, owing to staff deficiency. Apart from other problems faced by visitors, clerks who occupy footpath are further adding to their miseries and extorting money from them while filling up the forms.
One official said that the office had no calligrapher, as the other passport offices had
in the country, to fill the passport pages, adding that they had ordinary people to write names and other credentials of the passport holders in the copies.
“Only for VIP passports the office hires calligrapher,” he said, adding that in most of the other cases the handwriting
was so bad that neither the passport holders nor the immigration staff could read the particulars.
The sources said that the interior ministry had planned to introduce high-tech readable machines in the passport offices to resolve the problems, but the Peshawar office was lacking the infrastructure to handle the sophisticated equipment.
They said that the interior ministry was looking for a suitable site to construct a building, but the plan was to the day only present on the papers.
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