Revenue collection by DIP doubles over last five yrs

Mahmuda Shaolin | Published: March 01, 2009 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Revenue collection by Department of Immigration and Passport (DIP) had doubled over the last five years as the overall collection jumped by 101.39 per cent to Tk 8.85 billion in fiscal 2007-08 from Tk 4.29 billion in 2003-04.

The DIP has been able to surpass its collection targets through issuance of passports every year from 2003-04 to 2007-08, according to DIP.

DIP collected Tk 4.29 billion by issuing more than 1.02 million passports in 2003-04. It collected Tk 3.86 billion by issuing over 1.06 million passports in 2004-05, Tk 4.36 billion by issuing 1.37 million passports in 2005-6, Tk 5.76 billion by issuing 1.81 million passports in 2006-07 and Tk 8.85 billion through issuance of 2.0 million passports in 2007-08.

DIP's revenue collection has increased significantly as people are very much concerned over use of passports everywhere as passport is a legal document to introduce oneself as a good citizen. Therefore, everybody uses passport as an identity, said an official of DIP.

Besides, the number of passports has increased over the years mainly because of issuance of passport from other offices like Bangladesh Post Office, Trust Bank Limited and also from Regional Passport offices (RPO) and deputy commissioner (DC) offices across the country.

The issuance of passport will further increase when the DIP will start issuing Machine Readable Passport (MRP) at end of this year across the country, said DIP Director General (DG) Abdur Rob Howlader Saturday.

"Each passport issuing office is now issuing around 10,000 to 11,000 passports everyday and with the introduction of the MRP service across the country, we will be able to double our capacity," he also said.

He expressed the hope that DIP would earn Tk 9.00 billion in the end of current year.

As per the decision of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), all countries, including Bangladesh, must replace their manually processed passports with MRPs by April 2010. Manually processed passports will become obsolete after 2010 and such passports would no more be acceptable to immigration authorities across the world, ICAO said.

He said the MRP would meet all international standards as instructed by the ICAO and as a result no country would be able to harass Bangladeshi travellers including workers or to impound the manually processed passports on any ground.

Machine readable passports bear a zone where some of the information otherwise written in textual form as strings of alphanumeric characters, are printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.

Currently, an applicant has to wait from a week to over a month to get a passport, depending on the amount of money one pays for services.

"The MRP will ease the processing time. It'll replace the age-old manual system, which is not error-free, costly and time-consuming. The MRP is designed to be error-free," the DIP DG added.