October 20, 2006	Friday	Ramazan 26, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, Oct 19: The ministry of interior has decided to ‘completely overhaul’ the system of issuing passport and visa to restore what has been termed the dignity and authenticity of travel documents both in and outside the country.

Official sources said that the ministry has sought additional Rs1.8 billion from the finance division to install a new system aimed at having latest security features, laser perforation and new personalised solutions to be offered at 16 more cities and 97 foreign missions.

This would be the second phase of Machine Readable Passport (MRP) and Machine Readable Visa (MRV) project to cover Mardan, Timergara, Buner, Hangu and Chitral in the NWFP; Sahiwal, Rahimyar Khan, Attock and Jhelum in Punjab; Nawab Shah and Malir in Sindh; Kech, Gwadar and Zhob in Balochistan; and Gilgit and Bagh in the Northern Areas and Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

In the first phase, the system application was developed, tested and functionalised at the existing regional passport offices in Pakistan and foreign missions in New Delhi, Dubai, Jeddah, Rome, Frankfurt, Oslo, London, Toronto, New York and Los Angles.

Now 97 Pakistani missions would be covered in Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America to meet UN International Civil Aviation Organisation’s (ICAO) requirement to set the standards for travel documents by the year 2015 by which manual passports and visa would no longer remain valid documents.

The preference would be given to those Pakistani foreign missions abroad that have a higher demand either for passports or visa. The manual passports already issued by the government, local governments and foreign missions were estimated to be in the range of 5-6 million.

The new passport had put pressure on the system as the manual passports needed to be replaced along with providing the facility to new applicants. The demand would rise from 1.2 million passports per annum to 1.8 million in the projected five years of operations.

However, a surge was being experienced under the average demand risen to approximately 2 million per year.

The primary objective was to ensure that every passport/visa issuance office both in and outside the country was equipped well within time to issue Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTD) to enable Pakistan to fully comply with ICAO deadline and facilitate the public.

It would also enhance the capacity of the border control authorities through use of interface with MRP/MRV database and assist in the “prevention of trans-national crimes”.

The experience gained from running operations at the ten foreign missions that had been provided with the MRP/MRV system had shown that the response from the overseas Pakistani community remained low because they had to visit Pakistani missions from far off places to renew their passports and vast majority amongst them did not possess either the National Identity Card (NIC) or NICOP (for overseas Pakistanis) which were mandatory for the issuance of any type of travel document (MRP or manual).

However, the higher security needs associated and expected by the international fora did not allow such an arrangement under the new regime.