LAHORE: Applicants at the Garden Town Passport Office on Monday faced an inordinate delay in the passport process apparently because of repeated data disconnection from the centralized online system.

A majority of applicants, who had to wait for several hours to go through the process of five counters, complained of work at a snail’s pace by officials.

Some of them complained that disconnection of data was an excuse to accommodate protocols.

The department has been facing the data disconnection issue for several years because of failure to upgrade the IT gadgetry and sole dependence on the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) for the identification data of applicants.

“I am still awaiting the data entry at around 3pm at the counter No 3 and officials are saying the data of applicants is disconnected from the central server of Nadra”, said Khurram Javed of Iqbal Town, who came to the passport office for the renewal of passport and joined the queue for getting a token at 10:30am.

Data disconnection becomes a routine

He said the agents at the National Bank’s counter and the passport office lured applicants for speedy process. “The agents demand Rs350 for the challan fee, up to Rs1,500 for a token slip and Rs2,500 for going through all process at every counter,” he said.

He said officials at the counter No 3 asked him to wait till their online system got restored the bio-metric data.

Javed said that officials in connivance with the agents allowed the entry of applicants to the office to bypass regular applicants.

He suggested the passport authorities to issue tokens from the NBP and entertain only those applicants who got tokens from the bank to discourage agents.

Another applicant Amjad Ali, with token number 595, said he got his token at around 9:30am, but he was still awaiting at the counter No 3 due to the slow process at counters.

He said that officials told him that the online system from the head-office got disconnected.

Mrs Ali said the delay in the process was linked to malfunctioning of the system, but actually the applicants with protocol were being accommodated.

She criticized the officials for jumping the token numbers from regular sequel to the favoured applicants.

An officer at the GTPO, who preferred not to be quoted as per a circular of the department, conceded the disconnection of data from the centralized online system, saying it had become a routine matter.

He said the regional and district field offices were helpless in this regard as central authorities were responsible for providing uninterrupted data supply, but they paid no heed to the requests of field formations.

He said that sometime officials at the back-end in Islamabad claimed non-retrieval of data from their own online data server and sometime from Nadra, but he said he did not know exactly which way the data was disconnected repeatedly on Monday.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2016