ISLAMABAD, Aug 16: Flouting the orders of political personalities in Pakistan is not common but the same rule of thumb might not apply to the Interior Minister, Rehman Malik.
Mr Malik’s orders are often ignored by departments working under his Ministry’s administrative control.
One such example is interior minister’s surprise visit to Passport Office of Islamabad in July 2010.
“The interior minister had declared that the office building is unsuitable for passport seekers and ordered the management of director general’s office of passport and immigration to shift the office immediately to some other place,” reveals one letter of Interior Ministry, available with Dawn.
After the passage of two years, the building is still housed in the old premises in sector G-10 Markaz.
The white building currently housing the passport office of the capital city is located on the first floor of the two-storey tower.
Senior citizens and even special people have to climb the stairs of this building, which has a narrow entrance and poorly furnished structure for its daily visitors.
A federal government employee Imtiaz Ahmed added that he had to travel all the way from the rural part of the city for over 20km, since the office is located away from major business centres in the city.
“The building should have been at a central location in the city,” asserted Mr Ahmed.
The current building at sector G-10 Markaz is a rented apartment building having no major directions or signboards close to the building location, in order to guide the people to the accurate location.
“It’s almost difficult to reach here because the building is difficult to locate,” added Mr Ahmed.
The building has two main faded signboards also depicting negatively on part of the director general’s office, since the signboard of Passport and Immigration department is very difficult to read.
Inside the building, people have to wait for hours on their toes because of limited space and missing chairs.
Dirty washrooms, standing areas and even electricity outages are one of the routine problems at the passport office of the capital city.
The interior minister also directed the director general of passport in his order to establish nine additional counters to facilitate the people.
“There is only one counter for thumb impression, besides only two data entry operators are working to facilitate a rush of over 200 people visiting the passport office on daily basis,” said one official working with the acting director general of the Passportand Immigration department at its head quarters in sector G-9.
One senior citizen Abdul Wahab at the counter of the passport and immigration department of sector G-10 Markaz told Dawn: “We came here at 9:30am in the morning and its almost 12 in the afternoon…We were given an electronic token slip but its almost three hours and we are yet to see the official registering all the information relating to passport seekers.”
Despite multiple attempts, the acting director general of the passport and immigration department Irshad Bhatti was not available to comment on the failure of his department to implement the orders of Interior Minister.