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3 Days to Passport

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DQI Bureau
New Update

A common mans visits to the passport office are more often than not marred
by uncooperative staff, long waiting queues and unruly crowdsand if this was
not enough, the touts waiting outside the office to pounce on him makes him drop
all thoughts of pursuing the matter any further. Even if he gives up and falls
into the tout-trap, his passport takes at least a month to be delivered.

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But one cannot always blame the passport office staffthe number of passports
issued went up 2.2 times between 1997 to 2007, and by 2011, the demand would go
up to 1 crore. So have the number of passport offices gone up proportionately?
No. There continue to be thirty-seven offices, putting considerable strain on
manpower and infrastructure, leading to inevitable delays and headaches.
However, the Central Passport Organization managed to increase output and issued
about 50 lakh passports in 2007 as compared to around 35 lakh in 2005.

Even though most passport offices are fully computerized, there is a growing
need to make available services like real-time online tracking of status of
applications; an effective enquiry and grievance redressal system; digital photo
capture; and biometric passports.

It is to address issues like these and many more that the Indian government
decided to launch the ambitious Passport Seva Project. The objective behind
the project is to deliver all passport-related services to citizens in a timely,
transparent, accessible, and reliable manner; and in a comfortable environment
through streamlined processes, says Dr TV Nagendra Prasad, director (PV) &
project director (Passport Seva Project).

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The project is the second Mision Mode Project under the National e-Governance
Plan (NeGP) after MCA 21. The project is a service delivery transformation
project where it involves complete paradigm shift in service delivery experience
of passport applicants, says Tanmoy Chakrabarty, vice president & head,
government industry solutions Unit, Tata Consultancy Services.

The Passport Seva Project was conceived in the second half of 2006 for a
comprehensive reform of the passport issuance system. And following the
cabinets approval of the project in September 2007 through an open tender
process, TCS was selected as the service provider of the project.

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The entire project is being implemented on the Public Private Partnership
mode with TCS making the investments upfront on all non-strategic
infrastructure, software development, training, and change management. TCS
meanwhile would be paid on a quarterly basis by the MEA after fulfilling the
twenty-eight SLAs including customer friendliness, cleanliness of the premise to
technical aspects.

Elaborating on the role of TCS, Chakrabarty says that as the prime IT partner
of the project, we would be involved right from building applications to
setting up secure data centers, disaster recovery centers and call center for
applicants.

Salient Features

With the first phase expected to be completed by January 2010, four pilot
Passport Seva Kendras (PSKs) would be established at Chandigarh, Bangalore and
New Delhi. Under the project, TCS would be required to open 77 PSKs across
India. In all 77 PSKs, customer service and satisfaction would be the key
factor, says Chakrabarty.

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And once the project is completed, new passports would be issued in three
days time while in cases requiring police verification, within three days after
the completion of the process.

Explaining the design of the project, Prasad says that it ensures that only
support functions like improving citizen interface, managing technology
backbone, call centers, training and change management would be provided by TCS.
While the government would continue to exercise all sovereign and security
related functions in the passport issuance process. The MEA is in the process
of setting up a Special Purpose Vehicle to manage and exercise strategic control
over the operations of the project, he adds.

Considering that most passport office employees have to perform under
pressure handling large workloads, the project has taken into account these
concerns and includes a productivity-linked incentive scheme for the employees.
Police verification would be expedited through electronic linkage of the
district police headquarters with the passport seva portal.

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On the technical front, the project envisages creation of an all India data
center, disaster recovery center, and networking between all passport offices
and an electronic file system for passport processing running nationwide across
the entire organization.

Security Aspects

In the past, incidents of terrorists getting passports issued from Indian
passport offices have jeopardized the nations security and have also put a
question mark over the passport offices credibility. With the launch of the
Passport Seva Project, the same. A lot of thought has therefore gone into
addressing the security concerns.

The entire data of the Passport Seva System including personal information
including the biometric information of applicants, would be residing in the data
center and the disaster recovery center which would be located in the premises
belonging to the MEA. And the operation of these centers would be under the MEA
through a project management unit.

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As PSKs are the extended arms of the Central Passport Organization, they
would be headed by a senior officer of the CPO at each center. TCS would only be
responsible for handling visitors and capturing data relating to passport
applications. Activities like document verification, indexing and granting would
be done by the same government employees who are doing this now, using advanced
IT tools. There would be partitioning of the LAN at each of the PSKs between the
officials of the CPO and the operators of TCS. Also, government counters in PSKs
would be in an area distinctly marked for them from private counters of service
providers.

The sensitive function of handling blank passport booklets would also remain
with government employees. The data coming into TCS at the time of submission of
application would be used only to feed into the database; thereafter the data
would no longer be available to the TCS staff.

Benefiting the Citizens

Considering that most of us have had to spend anywhere around 1-2 months
running around the passport office and more often than not giving up in the
process, one of the single biggest advantage of the Passport Seva project would
be saving of the citizens time and effort.

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Moreover, there will be service provisioning within defined service levels,
availability of portfolio of on-line services with real-time status tracking and
enquiry including payment of fee on-line, an effective system of grievance
redressal, and a strict adherence to first-in-first out principle in rendering
of services.

For the passport office employees too, the project would bring in uniform and
simple work procedure, skill enhancement through training, better
accountability, incentives for higher productivity, increased promotion
opportunities, et al

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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