26 September 2004	Sunday	10 Shaban 1425

MULTAN, Sept 25: Passport seekers in this part of the country are facing enormous problems, as the regional passport offices are finding it difficult to entertain all applications well in time due to the shortage of green books.

Scores of people, including women, can be seen queued up any time during the working hours outside the local passport office situated in Gulgashat Colony. Several of them interviewed by this correspondent on Saturday said the issuance date of their passports had been due for the last over a month.

A majority of them wanted to perform umra during the holy month of Ramazan and, therefore, was in desperate need of passports. In an ordinary course of action, the passport office is liable to issue the passport within a week after receiving the application against normal fee of Rs1,500.

However, one can get the passport the very next day of filing application after depositing urgent fee of Rs4,000.

Sources in the local passport office revealed that at present an unprecedented number of 5,000 applications was pending for issuance. The office was now issuing the passports mainly against the urgent applications or against some special preference cases, they pointed out.

They said in normal days the office received about 200 applications daily while during umra the turn out swelled to 400 applications daily. They said the shortage of blank passport books had become a problem here for the last two months when on July 25 this year the head office directed the regional offices to slow down the issuance process.

When talked, regional office in-charge, assistant director Iqbal Khan Malghani, said according to his information the problem of the shortage of green books stemmed out from the Pakistan Printing Corporation, the official institution responsible to print the passport books.

It is said that a consignment of the paper imported to print the green books landed elsewhere in July instead of Pakistan while coming from Japan due to some misunderstanding at the level of the Pakistan Shipping Corporation, he added.

Therefore, he said, a backlog of one month had been created and the situation had become worse with the advent of umra season. "The office is finding in very difficult to cope with the situation, especially when it is still being supplied with limited number of blank books," he said.