Govt to launch machine readable passports by July 1, 2009

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Mahmuda Shaolin
The government Monday decided to launch the Machine Readable Passport (MRP) by July 1, 2009, nearly a year before an international deadline expires, a senior official said.
"An inter-ministerial meeting led by home adviser has set July 1 next year the targeted time to introduce the passport," director general of the Department of Immigration and Passport (DIP) Abdur Rob Hawlader told the FE.
"We will now sit with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to settle some of the technical issues. A tender will be launched by June this year," he said.
The decision came as Bangladesh has been set an April 2010 deadline by international organisations to launch the MRP, he added.
Machine Readable passports bear a zone where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.
This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agencies to process the passports quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer.
Most of the countries across the world have already introduced MRP or biometric passports to prevent global smuggling and cross-country terrorist operation.