ISLAMABAD, Aug 28: The old passports would be acceptable all over the world till their expiry dates as no country has so far refused to accept them, said Directorate of Immigration and Passport (DIP) Director-General Brig (retired) Khalid Habib.

Talking to Dawn here on Sunday, the DIP chief rejected an impression that old passports would become invalid by 2007.

He said despite introduction of machine readable passports (MRPs), the old passports would also be acceptable by all countries including the US, the UK and European states because they had parallel systems to check both MRPs and manual travel documents at their airports.

“No country can switch over to MRPs from old passports within two or three years because it is a long process,” he said.

The DG said Malaysia was the only country which had made it mandatory for the immigrants to come with MRPs. “This restriction is also applied to those Pakistanis who are going to Malaysia on work visa,” he added.

He said the production of manual passports had been stopped in the country since June 30, 2005 and now only MRPs were being issued from 28 stations by the DIP.

The official said no other department except the DIP should issue any statement about the validity of the old passports because it was the prerogative of the DIP.

“There is no doubt that the software for the MRPs was prepared by the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra), but we have paid for this. Now Nadra has nothing to do with the issuance of MRPs because it is our job,” he added.

The DIP chief said the government had formed a committee headed by him to announce the date after which old manual passports would become invalid.

He said the DIP had set 28 MRP centres in the country and 10 in different missions including the ones at Dubai, Jeddah, London, Rome, Frankfurt, Oslo and Toronto.

“How can we ask a Pakistani national in South Africa to replace his and his all family members’ old passports with the new ones because we have no facility at our mission in South Africa to issue MRPs,” he said.

Talking about preparation of MRPs, he said the software was prepared by Nadra and the total project cost was Rs3.8 billion.

At present, the DIP can issue 7,000 MRPs daily, however, this capacity will be increased to 8,000, he said. “The total number of Pakistani passport holders is about seven million,” he added.

The director-general said his organization had no objection to transferring MRP technology to any other country by Nadra. “We should be proud of it and it would fetch ample amount of foreign exchange,” he hoped.

Answering a question, he said: “Pakistan had no pressure to introduce MRPs system.”

About preparation of fake manual passports, he said though the problem had not been completely eradicated, it had been reduced to a large extent.

Brig Habib said introduction of MRPs system had eliminated smuggling of children to Arab countries where they were used as camel jockeys because now every person had to come to the passport office to get his/her passport.