Bangladesh: Passport delivery in shambles
Applicants are struggling to obtain their electronic passports these days as the Department of Immigration and Passports is witnessing a surge in the number of e-passport applications after international travels from Bangladesh have begun to be eased.
On Sunday, hundreds of applicants scrambled for completing their application process at the Dhaka regional passport office at Agargaon throughout the day amid Covid risks while the limited number of officials and support staff struggled to deliver passports or receive applications and collect biometric data.
According to both officials and applicants, the regional passport office, adjacent to the DIP headquarters, has been receiving some four times the usual number of applications a day for weeks.
A DIP headquarters senior official said that they were facing a novel problem as some 35 per cent of applications were not getting cleared at the basic checking stage by the newly introduced German software, exacerbating the situation.
Those who have submitted their applications without any incorrect information are getting their passports on time, said the official.
The official, however, admitted that difficulties at the passport office might be responsible for delays in the delivery of passports in 5 per cent of cases.
Professor Mahbubul Mokaddem Akash of the Dhaka University economics department was seen visiting the DIP headquarters on Sunday for getting his passport.
According to the passport office, the professor submitted his application on October 10 and was supposed to get his passport on October 24.
He has already visited the regional passport office a couple of times after the scheduled delivery date, said an official.
The professor again came on Sunday to the office of the DIP divisional director Abdullah Al Mamun, a former student of his, for the passport.
The professor, with some hesitation, said that he had submitted all the valid documents but still he was not getting his passport, which he needed to travel to India for medical check-up.
According to officials, the professor has mentioned his date of birth according to his corrected national identity card but the software was not accepting it.
Abdullah Al Mamun said that his office had nothing to do with the professor’s problem as any sort of change was strictly prohibited in the passport of public employees as per a home ministry instruction issued on April 28, 2021.
The instruction was mainly issued over the procedure related to the reissuance of passports allowing all but public employees to make a couple of changes, including in the age of an applicant by up to five years.
‘Where should I go now? I need my passport urgently,’ the professor asked his former student.
Another applicant, Urmi Das from Jhenaidah, along with her mother Sathi Rani Das, was moving from door to door at the divisional passport office at Agargaon to clear her application which she submitted on March 21, 2019.
The delivery date of her passport was April 11, 2019.
She said that she had submitted the application to update her passport seeking the inclusion of the name of her husband Pritom Kundu in it.
She waited for months and visited the office twice earlier for the passport, she said.
She came on Sunday morning again and made frantic efforts until evening and left the office disappointed.
Urmi’s mother Sathi Rani blamed what she said the poor management capacity of the office.
Over the delayed deliveries and poor management, Abdullah Al Mamun said that the government needed to set up at least two more passport offices in Dhaka, especially at Banasree and Basila amid increasing number of applications.
He pointed out that his office had the capacity to receive 500 to 700 applications daily but it was now getting over 2,000 applications a day.
‘We have an extreme shortage of manpower,’ he said, adding that his office has only 22 data-entry staff for some 2,000 applications a day on average.
Apart from large numbers of applications, many applicants come with errors in their application, do not have all the documents in order, have mismatch in the previous passport or the NID card or the birth registration certificate, the official noted.
The newly introduced German software would not clear an application if there is any sort of mismatch in it like the change of ‘Md’ to ‘Muhammad’, or if the word ‘late’ was put before the names of the decease parents.
Abdullah Al Mamun admitted that there was lack of measures to create awareness of the correct procedure of e-passport application while people were rushing to the passport office after the Covid restrictions were withdrawn.
Medical certificates are also essential from the applicants who cannot provide the images of their irises and the 10-finger print, among others, he further said.
As the passport office was getting overcrowded, many brokers, with the help of Ansar members at the office, were approaching applicants to complete their application-submission process for money.
According to e-passport project officials, some 12,00,000 e-passports have been issued since 2019.
