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MRP for thousands without verification

Over 1.7 lakh applications pending for delay in police report, slow printing

M Rahman
With 1.7 lakh applicants waiting for their travel documents for months, the government has decided to issue machine readable passports without police verification if the law enforcers fail to file reports on time.
Around 70,000 people have been waiting because police failed to file their verification reports within the stipulated time while the rest one lakh became victims of slow printing of passports by the authorities.
The passport seekers had been waiting for several months to around two years for their travel documents, home ministry sources said.
The decision to go without the police verification reports was made during a meeting at the Prime Minister's Office on August 12. This means the 70,000 people waiting for their travel documents would get them soon.
Home Secretary CQK Mustaq Ahmed, Director General Abdul Mabud of the Department of Immigration and Passport, and Brig Gen Refayet Ullah, project director of Machine Readable Passports, attended the meeting.
Brig Gen Refayet told The Daily Star that in the cases of people asking for passports on emergency basis, which require higher fees, the authorities would wait 15
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days for the police verificationreports.
And if by that time the reports were not filed, the authorities would just deliver the passport to the individuals.
In the cases for regular machine readable passports, the authorities would wait 30 days for the verification report.
Brig Gen Refayet said if police submitted a bad report on a person, his or her passport would be cancelled even if it had been delivered.
However, according to the Department of Immigration and Passport office's rules, a person seeking a passport on emergency basis would get the travel document within seven days. The regular passport seekers would get them within 15 days.
Special Branch (SB) of Police said it was not the SB but the passport authorities who were to blame for the delays.
Special Superintendent Nazrul Islam of SB (passport verification section) said
passport authorities waste two to three days just to send the documents to police and then another two to three days to process the police report.
Referring to a case study prepared by the SB in September, 2011, he said the SB spent 8.59 days on average to prepare a report of an individual seeking a passport on emergency basis, for regulars it was 9.93 days on average.
Several high officials of SB, requesting anonymity, expressed concern over the decision to deliver passports without police verification reports.
They said in 2007 the then government issued several thousand passports without police reports. Later it was discovered that 2,772 people used fake addresses to get the passports and had left the country.
Many of them were non Bangladeshi Rohingya refugees.
Brig Gen Refayet said the passport authorities would now be waiting longer for
the police reports allowing the law enforcers to complete their job.
It takes twice as long to print a machine readable passport now.
After installing all three passport printing machines at Agargaon, the government asked the authorities to add some additional information on page-3 and -48 of travel documents.
The existing machines cannot print the information offhand; so a passport has to be printed twice for page-3 and -48 changes, consuming double the time it would have required, home ministry sources said.
Big Gen Refayet said they introduced double shifts over the last one and a half months to reduce the backlogs of printing.
A director of the passport office in Agargaon said their printing capacity is 7,000 passports a day while they need 13,000 passports to be printed a day. He said with the two shifts, the backlog should be clear in the next few months.