May 7, 2005	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 27, 1426

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ISLAMABAD, May 6: The Directorate of Immigration and Passport will stop issuing manual passports by June 30 this year, Director-General of Immigration and Passport Mian Khalid Habib said on Friday. “With putting in place the machine-readable passport system at all 29 regional passport offices by June 30, 2005, we will stop issuing manual passports,” he said.

The DG said a decision about the validity of already-issued manual passports would be made by a committee constituted for the purpose. But, he added: “No manual passport will be issued after June 30.”

Mr Habib expressed satisfaction with the progress made so far for achieving the targets set by the prime minister. “We have already started issuing machine-readable passports from 18 regional offices and the remaining 11 offices will have this system by June 30,” he said.

The machine-readable passport system was installed in October last year and the first passport was issued on October 25, 2004. So far, the directorate has issued about 200,000 MRPs.

Mr Habib said 10 Pakistani missions in the Middle East and European countries as well as the US had been identified for installing this system by the end of June this year. These countries are the UAE, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Canada, India, Norway and Germany with two stations in the United States — Los Angeles and New York.

“We have started issuing MRPs from Dubai and Jeddah and our team will leave for London and other Europe cities in the last week of May,” he said. In reply to a question, the DG denied shortage of passport copies at the Pakistani missions abroad. “We have around 500,000 surplus copies with us and can facilitate missions when and where required,” he said.

He said the directorate had received no complaint about the non-availability of passport copies from any mission during the last three months. About functioning of the system, he said it was a transparent system and helped a lot in curbing the menace of fake passports.

“There is no queue jumping. It is a transparent system with no possibility of issuing a fake passport as every applicant has to personally appear for data collection,” he said and added that there was also no chance for a photo change now.

“I must say it is the best system as the information fed to computer by our staffers is counter checked with the Nadra database,” Mr Habib said. Responding to another question about fake entries of children on passports for smuggling them to Middle East as jockeys, the DG said: “It will happen no more. Now every individual, even a child of nine months, is issued individual passport.”

He said earlier children were added to the passport of parents, but now every child was issued his or her own passport. When asked about issuance of more than one passport to any individual, he said it was not possible now as under the system of ‘facial match’, computer identified the person who tried to get another passport.

“Now, any person having two identity cards cannot have two passports,” he stressed. The DG said the computerised passports project was worth Rs2.8 billion and the department would be spending this amount in eight years.

When asked about the deadline for issuing MRPs to every Pakistani, he said there were more than six million Pakistanis holding passports and the department had constituted a committee to sort out as to what should be the deadline.

About Afghan national getting fake passports, the DG said if they managed to get an identity card even then they would not be able to get a passport in the present system. He expressed confidence that this system would prove helpful in checking the issuance of fake passports and human smuggling.—APP