Four new Passport and Immigration offices at Mirpur, Abbottabad, Rawalpindi and Bannu will be completed within one month with the assistance of Ministry of Housing and Works. At present there are 15 customised passport offices in various cities and eight are under construction and after completion will be providing state-of-the-art services to the public.
According to Director General Immigration and Passports Sikandar Sultan Raja, the directorate has taken steps to provide friendly and corruption-free environment to the public and improve management. These administrative steps include surprise visits, crackdown against agent mafia with the help of district administration, disciplinary proceedings against corrupt and inefficient staff, review and rationalisation of staff posted at Regional Passport Offices and head office.
Talking to APP, the DG Passports said he recently paid a surprise visit to Passport Office Peshawar. While taking notice of the disorganised working and uncleanliness, he gave 15 days to office incharge to improve conditions for citizens. About 6000 passports were lying undelivered in the Peshawar office, he told.
The Directorate has set up facilitation desk at head office and information centres at Regional Passport Offices besides display of guidelines regarding procedure of issuance of passports and fee structure. There are 93 Regional Passport Offices all over Pakistan and 32 offices are outside Pakistan. Pakistan is under international obligation to provide machine readable passport facilities at the remaining 77 missions abroad before November 2015 otherwise visas will be refused to Pakistani nationals living abroad and having manual passports.
The total number of passports issued since 2004, when machine readable passport facility was initiated is 23 million and the number of applicants on daily basis is about 20,000. So far, complete replacement of manual passports with machine readable passports has been accomplished within Pakistan.
Public has responded well to the Directorate's SMS service 9988 for tracking of passport and online complaint system through web, reducing the time period for delivery of urgent and ordinary passports. A total number of 910 emails were received in October, 2013 containing complaints and queries and 80 percent have been resolved and rest are under process.
6,588 calls had been received and responded through helpline 0800-34477 in September and October. 62,000 SMS were received for checking status of passports since launching of the service on October 12. Sixty three complaints have been lodged through Online Complaint System on web since its launching on October 26 and 90 percent of them had been resolved and rest are under process.
The directorate recently activated Machine Readable Passport and Visa Audit Wing to minimise the issuance of fraudulently obtained passports. The efforts have resulted in complete replacement of manual passports with machine readable passports, clearing of backlog of 800,000 passports, citizenship certificates and renunciation of citizenship certificates. The directorate is relying on computerised report generation of each and every step involved in the issuance of passports starting from data entry at Regional Passport offices, printing of passports at head office, shipment of passports to Regional Passport offices and finally delivery to the applicants.
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