LAHORE, Dec 26: To cope with growing number of applicants and minimise their sufferings at the hands of tout mafia, the federal government has decided to establish third passport office in the city at Defence Housing Authority in two months or so, it is learnt.

Currently two passport offices cater to 14 million population of Lahore, Sheikhupura and Kasur while Karachi has six independent offices for 16 million people.

Sources in the Immigration and Passport department told Dawn that after months-long deliberations the government had finally agreed to the proposal floated by the department officials and it was likely that the project would be approved by the finance ministry in near future.

They said the project of third office in the city was apparently aimed at facilitating residents of Defence and adjacent localities. The project was under serious consideration after `Defence elite’ also interfered in the matter.

Currently, two passport offices - Garden Town and Abbot Road - are catering to around 1,200 applicants a day not only from Lahore city district but also from Sheikhupura and Kasur districts and the figure increases up to 1,500 in Haj, Umra and study season.

Another factor of increasing rush is growing trend of people leaving the country for immigration and employment purpose.

The Garden Town passport office has a capacity of 400 applicants and Abbot Road office can facilitate up to 300 visitors smoothly in available infrastructure.

As the city’s population stands at around 10 million and districts of Sheikhupura and Kasur have population estimates of four million, the officials believe that two passport offices, which are already short of 30 per cent staff and lack proper seating and counters for visitors, are insufficient.

They say with the addition of another office, number of applicants a day will be divided which would not only save their time but also improve the working of over-burdened staff.

Officials further say the new passport office will also be helpful to some extent in discouraging tout mafia (nexus of touts and passport officials) which takes advantage of applicants’ impatience to go through long queues outside passport offices. They say at least two offices are required to handle the visitors within available resources.

Citizens also complain that they are not entertained speedily despite reaching on-time in the morning and getting tokens in queues.

Muhammad Usman, who came to Garden Town passport office for a new passport, said: “I am surprised to see horrible rush of applicants and slow pace of work by staff. I got a token at 9am and am still waiting for my turn at 3:45pm which is 100 tokens away. I don’t know when I will be passed through the whole process.”

Talking to Dawn, he said it appeared that the people either through queue or through agent mafia were thronging the passport office and the staff was not able to entertain them. Another applicant, who identified himself as Akbar Ali, said the government must either expand the existing setup of the passport offices or establish more to meet the growing need.

A Garden Town passport official, who wished not to be named, said: “We are witnessing a massive rush now -- a day after the federal government approved increase in passport fee.”

He said according to the notification, the fee for ordinary as well as urgent passports had been increased from Rs2,100 to 3,100 and Rs4,000 to 5,000, respectively with effect from Jan 2, 2012.

He, however, said new passport office was required in the city on an urgent basis to mitigate the sufferings of people.