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Hand-written passports lead to travellers' hassle

Rizanuzzaman Laskar
Unlike the worldwide introduction of updated technologies in passports thanks to security concerns, the government continues issuing the primitive hand-written books, which often lead travellers to face unwarranted hassles at airports.
Moreover, lack of skilled passport issuing officials makes it more miser able for the bearers home and abroad.
When machine-readable passports are standardised worldwide by the international Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and most countries use these along with biometric ones, Bangladeshi nationals carry passports prepared manually using primitive technologies.
Against this backdrop, foreign immigration officers often have to give a Bangladeshi passport more time than usual in terms of detailed scrutiny for security concerns FROM PAGE 1
"It's not surprising to have Bangladeshi travellers singled out for interrogation in the airports abroad as our passports barely meet the international standards," said an official from the Department of Immigration and Passport (DIP) asking not to be identified.
"Our passports are not machine-readable. The manual process of scripting and pasting photographs on the pages makes it vulnerable to forgery."
Untidy and barely readable handwritten data make the passports issued by DIP more substandard, raising questions about qualification of the officials concerned.
It sometimes appears the officials who fill out passports have little knowledge about spacing, indents or even alignments. They also tend to defy standard writing norms and use small letters where capital letters are a must.
A passport issued in December last year reads the bearer's occupation "Pnirale Sunrice" instead of "Private Service" and hometown "Meenliganj" instead of "Munsiganj".
In another passport issued in September last year, the bearer's name is barely recognisable. "I was appalled as I had to struggle to figure out the spelling of my own name," said Arafat-ur Rahman, an undergraduate student.
His address was more confusing as "Sreenagar" can unmistakably pass as "Greenroad".
Such mistakes and typos are frequent in a good number of passports. Rokeya Begum, a resident of Rampura, was stunned to see she was sharing the same birth date and year with her eight-year-old daughter.
The error eventually cost her the visa to India after she spent a whole day in the queue with the application.
Another passport was issued with Die expiry date 1917 instead of 2007. There are numerous instances an applicant had to wait several days to correct mistakes that were not their fault in the first place.
The passport holder may even be sent back to the country if foreign customs or law officials discover any such mistakes.
"This [passport) is what I will have to present to the world when I travel. Passport handwriting should be of a high standard. When you present it to anyone, for that moment you are like an ambassador representing your country and its values. A passport with bad handwriting gives likewise bad impression about one's origin," the DIP official said.
A lack of adequate human resources and ever-increasing demand for passports are blamed for the decline in the quality of passports.
The DIP has a small number of officials in its 15 branches across the country to fill out the passports. The Agargaon Passport Office has eight of these officials for the specifictask.
The organisational charter of duties points out that a passport writer is supposed to handwrite no more than 45 passports a day. However, there are times when a writer has to fill out five pages of over 150 to 200 passports each everyday.
This is a hectic task for a single person that leads to a decline in the quality and increase in errors, DIP officials said.
However, insiders told The Daily Star the officials concerned often resort to peons to do their job due to excessive workload. These peons by any means lack the skill and credibility required to fill such an important international document.
"All the staff members are overworked, especially those who fill out the passports, due to our limited manpower," said DIP Director General Abdur Rob Hawladar.
He said the Agargaon office issues around 1,000 passports on average every day with only seven to eight people to work on those.
"We're aware of the problems people are to face because of these passports. We're constantly trying to improve the quality by introducing guidelines and better supervision."
He expressed the hope that all the problems will be solved with the introduction of machine-readable passports.
Machine-readable passports bear a zone where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.
This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agencies to process such passports quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer.
If everything goes accordingly, machine-readable passports will be introduced in the country by next year, the director general added.
The indispensable government department and its 15 offices have 313 officials and employees against already existing 397 posts.
The number of staff should be increased by 10 times considering the ever-growing demand for passports, a DIP official observed.