KARACHI: The Saddar branch of the passport office in Karachi still maintains a heavy rush of people applying for their Machine Readable Passports.

Catering primarily to the residents of Karachi’s South, little has changed as far as the exterior of this passport office is concerned and agents still throng the building’s entrance, waiting to secure any client fool enough to fall into their clutches.

While these agents at one time played a most crucial part in the processing of applications for the old passports, engineering their way through the older breed of less than honest officials by getting work done on priority basis for ‘a sum’, their assistance is no more a necessity with the new procedure in place. Yet, they are seen thronging the premises forcing their attentions and offering assistance for a small fee for the same process that the applicant will need to go through with or without their help.

It is quite an inexplicable phenomenon, why these individuals are allowed at all to roam free outside the building which should be a secured area. For those falling prey to their glib lines, which offer ‘no waiting period’ it’s a rude shock to find that these groupies are good only for getting the bank challan submitted – the easiest part of the entire process anyway. The following steps require the applicant’s personal presence for the half-day stint at the passport office where they have to go through a lengthy process of paying the fee, finger printing, photography and data verification and there is no available ‘short cut’ as all the applicants must wait for their token number in any of the allotted rooms.

When the National Database and Registration Authority first ‘redefined’ the registration of all citizens through its ‘revolutionary system of registration of Pakistani nationals within and outside Pakistan,’ it was more in the nature of an anarchic system let loose on the people with limited understanding of its needs and requirements. As an added impediment, there was a timeframe given in which the citizens had to gather the required papers and submit the forms to a bunch of officers/workers who themselves had little clue on what the ‘advanced technology of Nadra’ was all about. It took more than a year to settle eventually to a smoother process but not without a number of ‘remakes’ of the computerised national identity cards had to be issued as hilarious foul ups and blunders were seen in the initial CNICs with male members shown as women in some cases and the Urdu script playing havoc with English spellings.

It was the same when Nadra linked its programme with the passport and immigration office and revolutionised the older versions into e-passports with the purpose of curbing counterfeit passports and created the new multi-biometric electronic passport. Including the machine readable system developed by Nadra, the new passports have a facial recognition and fingerprint identification method, a feature which came under severe criticism in our assemblies along with the heated debate on removing the religion column.How far Pakistan has been able to deflect terrorist and criminal activities by this added feature cannot be gauged but it was rather mortifying to have the profession removed, as one had to ‘pay extra’ in the ‘old days’ to get certain professions affixed on the passport. All that effort is now down the drain!

The entire MRP project was put up at a cost of US$8 million to US$9 million involving the development of passport offices at 25 locations nationwide, as well as in 10 foreign missions but alas, the citizens went through sheer hell when applying for the dreaded MRPs.

In Karachi, there was just one office in the Awami Markaz allotted in the first year which saw applicants treated like beggars at a fish market the way they were packed into confined areas to stand in a long line for a procedure which took them an entire day to get the work done. And because of inefficiencies of the handling officers, they were even required to go through the procedure twice in some cases.

If the idea is to make things simple by electronic accessibility why isn’t Nadra cutting down in processes of the MRP since it tags with the Nadra data which is already fed into the CNICs? Why does the finger-printing repeated and why does the data need to be verified yet again? – steps which stretch the waiting line and extend the process.

As for the CNICs, if it is made once, a lost card should simply be made by informing the department over the telephone, instead of the person going through the entire procedure again. There is still a reasonable rush even at the Nadra offices all over the city and applicants have to make a queue outside the window which stretches down towards the road in the glaring heat.

While Nadra’s state-of-the-art computer programming efficiencies may be complimented, the integration of its programme into the MRP has been grossly mismanaged with no concern shown for the citizens. There is still no clear cut instructions available on the documents required to make the new passports and it is easy to fall prey to the agents lurking outside, simply because they ‘know more’ than the applicant.

At least one information desk must be provided at the entrance either by the passport and immigration division or by Nadra itself to give clear directions to applicants who spend the first half hour trying to find their bearings amid the rabble-like structure of the passport office which has not been renovated for the past many decades.

If it weren’t for the geniality of some of the younger recruits in the passport office and even in the Nadra kiosks, half the applicants would go around in circles before getting any work done and the other half would still fall prey to the agents.