Infotech Lead Asia: Passport Seva Project (PSP) Bangalore, an online initiative, has processed 11.75 lakh passport applications and issued 10.9 lakh Passports/PCC to the citizens in the last 3 years.
In the last three years, the online Passport initiative has undergone several operational improvements.
There are 4 PSKs in Karnataka — two in Bangalore and one each in Hubli and Mangalore.
L Madan Kumar Reddy, acting regional passport officer, Bangalore, said, “To make the whole experience citizen friendly, we have also organized several Passport Mela(s) to enhance the accessibility of passports for people and ease the rush of applicants.”
Number of passport applications processed by Bangalore RPO increased by over 43 percent, while from April 2012 to April 2013 the increase is 20 percent i.e. from 30,500 to 36,500 on a monthly basis.
With the pendency of Police Verification (PV) reports at an all-time low (41,500), there has been a tremendous increase in the percentage of PV’s completed within 21 days i.e. from 31 percent (in 2010) to 43 percent (in quarter ending March 2013).
The project has doubled the application handling capacity at the two PSKs (Lal Bagh in Bangalore and Mangalore) to accommodate more applicants and address high demand for passports.
Productivity was improved and Bangalore RPO is handling more than 2000 passport applications on a daily basis, which is five times more than it used to handle three years back.
With an objective to reduce the time taken to conduct police verification, which involved paper file movement, a unique initiative has been taken in Bangalore on a pilot scale.
Under this 102 police stations of the Bangalore city are connected online to each other and PV requests are directly sent to the respective police stations from the PSKs itself. Thus, dependency on paper file movements has been reduced to minimum increasing the turn-around time
As part of MEA’s e-Governance initiatives, the Passport Seva Project (PSP) has transformed the passport issuance system across India through an increased network of 77 PSKs.
