Online Registration & Issuance of Passports to Start From April Next Year
Online Registration & Issuance of Passports to Start From April Next Year
The National Assembly of Pakistan has been informed that an online registration and issuance service for machine readable passports will begin start from April 2016. This information was revealed by Interior Minister Chaudhary Nisar on Monday while addressing a question from another member of the parliament.
The Minister said that the new online system will initially be launched within the country while it will be expanded to foreign Pakistan passport offices at a later stage. He stated that, at the moment, there are 83 Pakistani missions abroad which are allowed to issue machine readable passports (MRPs). The aforementioned missions will be able to offer the new online service by the middle of next year.
Chaudhary Nisar also revealed that, in the past, rules for official Blue Passports had been relaxed by the discretionary power of the Interior Minister’s office. He said that the present government cancelled about 2,000 passports under the questionable excuse of public interest.
Online application and issuance of National Identity Cards (NIC) has already started while the process still requires a few more months for the service to be consolidated, said the Interior Minister. He said that hundreds of thousands of fake identity cards had been revoked and firm action has been taken against several NADRA officials.
Minster Chaudhary Nisar stated that a committee of members representing different parliamentary parties will be formed to work with NADRA and solve the issue on how to block identity cards under different scenarios.
The Interior Ministry had been working to optimise the process of getting official documents for nearly a year. The Ministry announced in June that an Online CNIC issuance service will be launched. The service was inaugurated by NADRA on the 4th of August. The Home Ministry was also supposed to launch a passport home delivery service in June but it got delayed and became available last month. The service was made official as TCS Passport Express Service and can be availed by citizens residing in major cities around the country.
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