Bengaluru Office Issues Record Number Of Passports

As the first mission mode project under the national e-governance plan, the passport seva project was piloted and launched from this city in May 2010 by then external affairs minister S.M. Krishna, who hails from Karnataka.

"We have reduced the waiting period for appointments to one day from the earlier 40-50 days despite staff crunch and growing number of applicants from across the state, with Bengaluru accounting for 50 percent of them," the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) cadre officer said.

Admitting that police verification was a time-consuming process owing to resource constraints in the state police, Karthigeyan said that with incentives and online processing, processing duration has been reduced to 23 days from 43 days in the past.

"Efforts are on to further reduce the police verification to 12 days through incentives and special drives to clear the backlog across the state for general applicants, while such verification is done later for Tatkal applicants," he added.

Of the 37 regional passport offices across India, the Bengaluru regional office is second after Lucknow to issue the highest number of passports, replacing the Hyderabad office, which was separated from its counterpart in Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh following bifurcation.
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