LAHORE: At least 900 applicants faced a trying ordeal at the Garden Town Passport Office — the Punjab headquarter of the Directorate General of Immigration and Passports, Islamabad — on Tuesday when the system halted owing to a “disruption in the online database system”.

Other passport offices across the province faced a similar situation leading to public anxiety and minor clashes, officials said.

A majority of people came to the Garden Town office for getting new or renewed passports to be able to perform Haj.

Officials said a good number of people were turning up daily for acquiring urgent passports keeping in view Haj and academic requirements. Those who came to collect their passports on due dates also returned empty-handed because of the usual delay.

The officials blame the backlog of passports on “severe shortage” of lamination paper (which is imported from Germany).

A source revealed that the online system was usually ‘intentionally’ switched off from the headquarters and an artificial shortage of printing material was created to make people go for urgent facility and help the officials line their purses.

He said sometimes the main server of the Directorate General of the Immigration and Passports slowed down due to slowing of Nadra link but it was usually restored in five minutes.

A visit to the GTPO and chat with some applicants and officials concerned revealed that the centralised server installed in Islamabad malfunctioned at different time intervals, which added to the woes of a large number of visitors including women and children.

Visitors stood in long queues in the main hall which has a limited number of seats, presenting a scene of chaos.

“I got the token slip on Monday morning and has come again today (Tuesday) for passport processing as at least 250 applicants were sent home on the plea that online system was not working,” said Ali Mohsin, a passport-seeker.

He said he was still awaiting his turn to pass through the first counter dealing with data entry, adding the same excuse was repeated.

An elderly woman, who wishes to perform Hajj this year, was seen in panic as she was asked to wait for restoration of the Nadra record. Knowing that the Hajj applications were being received from March 5, she was seen almost beseeching the officials to expedite the process.

Some of the applicants were frustrated and two men fell out when one of them attempted to get token slip by contacting a tout out of the queue.

Some officials in connivance with touts kept issuing the token slips after the deadline of 11:30am, which aggravated the sufferings of the applicants who were already waiting for the process to start.

“I’ll receive Rs7,000 for urgent passport (original fee is Rs5,000) and Rs5,000 for an ordinary one (official fee is Rs3,000) and you will not only skip the queue but also get the slip ahead of all visitors in the queue,” said agent Muhammad Imran who was luring visitors just outside the main door of the building.

He said he would keep Rs500 himself and hand over Rs1,500 to the officials.

An official told Dawn that the data processing from the main server linked with Nadra had been facing disruptions for the last two days, causing much inconvenience to the staff as well. He said shortage of counter staff was an additional botheration as three officials were short at five interview counters on Tuesday.

He said passports were also being delivered to the applicants ahead of schedule with one-month time for urgent passport and three months for ordinary passport. He said approximately 900 applicants were visiting the GTPO for new process and 400 others for passport collection.