LAHORE, Aug 10: The city passport office continues to face shortage of passport books due to which hundreds of applicants have been facing problems. Students, businessmen and people intending to perform Umra have been awaiting their passports for over a month.

Over 5,000 applications are pending with the office due to unavailability of books. The officials concerned are said to be discouraging people to apply for ordinary passports. As many as 600 books are required to meet the daily demand.

Other districts like Faisalabad, Multan, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sargodha, Gujrat, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan are also facing shortage of passport books. The Punjab governor had ordered the passport office director-general on July 26 to provide 30,000 books to these cities within a week, but none of those has received the books so far.

When talked, Lahore passport office deputy-director Shamshad Ahmad Khan said he could not give the exact date when the books would arrive. However, he admitted that the office was facing problems due to shortage of books. He denied that the officials had stopped issuing ordinary passports.

The National Printing Corporation of Pakistan issues 12,000 passport books a month. The shortage of books started when the passport related material, which had to be imported through the NPCP, was loaded in another ship by mistake.