Director General (DG) I&P Wajid Bokhari said on Tuesday that on the recommendation of the Senate's Standing Committee on Interior and Narcotics Control, the Ministry of Finance had agreed to release funds to I&P in a few days, which would enable the directorate to clear backlog of 200,000 passport applicants. He said that funds would be provided to the Security Printing Corporation of Pakistan (SPCP), which provides blank passport booklets.
However, an official said that the backlog of passports would is likely to increase because of the delaying tactics employed by the Ministry of Finance in the release of funds. When asked why the directorate could not utilise its own revenue, he said that under the rules, it was mandatory for the government departments to deposit all revenue collected by them in the national exchequer and they were not allowed to use it.
The funds are allocated to public sector departments/organisations through budget for development and current expenditure, they added. Only autonomous bodies can utilise their revenues without the need for depositing it in the national exchequer, he said.
The official said that I&P was receiving between 10,000 and 15,000 applications on a daily basis while SPCP issued a small number of blank booklets to the directorate every day because of the ongoing financial crisis.
The directorate, he said, was also facing shortage of manpower, adding that there were more than 160 vacancies that needed to be filled immediately. The official further said that because of the shortage of blank booklets, the passport office was only issuing passports to VIPs. Under the rules and regulations, the directorate is bound to issue urgent passport within 4 to 6 days and normal passport within 15 days, but over 200,000 people had not yet been issued passports even after the passage of several months, he said.
Comments
Comments are closed.