LAHORE, April 6: Passport applicants across the country have been receiving their ordinary passports after one and a half months or so instead of specified 15-day period because of dysfunctional printing system and absence of any back-up support in Islamabad. Applicants are also complaining that officials are giving at least 12-day time period for urgent passport collection instead of six days.

Officials, however, claim that three categories of passports - Gratis, Diplomatic and Urgent - are being issued to the applicants in time.

They say applicants in large numbers are lodging their complaints with the authorities concerned regularly for inconvenience they are facing in getting ordinary and renewed passports.

“I am to travel to Saudi Arabia for job within one and a half months but ordinary passport will be available even after two-month period. Now I will have to apply for an urgent one,” said Aamir Ishaq of Kasur, who was on a visit to the Garden Town office for renewal of his passport.

He said the staff was giving a time up to two months for the collection of passports complaining that the delay was on the part of the head office.

Saima Mehboob of Harbanspura said: “I and my children are to travel to Kuwait on husband’s visa in coming 10 days on urgent basis but officials at Qilla Gujjar Singh office told me that I could collect urgent passport after 12 days instead of five to six days.”

A senior passport official told Dawn that around 50 per cent printers installed at Islamabad office had become obsolete and the department had no back-up support.

He said according to his information the current system was printing only 6,000 passports a day against the receipt of 12,000 applications, adding that the printing capacity was currently half.

He said the two-phase project of machine-readable passport (MRP) made functional in 2004 currently lacked imported printers, cameras,

bio-metric devices, laminators and laminating machines as a back-up support which was the cause of delay in the printing process.

He said the government was earning 100 per cent passport fee but hardly spending five per cent of the total earnings on human resource and infrastructure development. “Against the sanctioned strength of 1,006 staff for MRS project throughout the country, the Immigration and Passport Office has 215 staffers.” He informed this reporter that the authorities were currently in the process of making deals with the companies in USA, Germany and Japan for purchasing lamination rolls, printers, ink and raw material for passport copy.

He said some printers were being purchased on emergency basis which would improve the timing in coming 15 to 20 days. — Staff Reporter