Pankaj Dastider
CHITTAGONG, Feb 17: Chittagong regional passport office under the Ministry of Home Affairs has earned Tk 380 million by issuing over 0.108 million machine readable passports(MRP) in the last calendar year.
Against 1,02,500 applications in the calendar year 2017 the regional passport office handed 96,107 passports over to the applicants almost within the stipulated time. The people are quite happy over receiving the MRPs, visitors said at the regional passport office at Panchlaish in the city on Thursday last.
They, however, said the members of the special branch of the Bangladesh Police take much time in submitting the verification reports due to stringent policy of the government against issuance of passports to safeguard national security.
Sources said the office is running with old machines that cause delay in the delivery of passports. The machines need to be replaced with the new ones to ensure prompt services to the clients.
Shamsul Alam, a passport seeker from Mohra area in the city, said he had submitted a bank receipt of Tk 3, 450 with the application for a general category passport. He was scheduled to get the MRP within 21 days but he got in 35 days because the police delayed in submitting the report.
He said the passport office was not liable for the delay because the men from the district SB office called on his cell him within a few days after submitting the application. The Passport office promptly sent the form to the police office, he came to learn.
Deputy Director of the Chittagong Regional Passport Office Abu Noman Md Zakir Hossain said those who apply for urgent passport need to deposit Tk 6, 900 per passport. They get the passports within seven to 10 days from submission of the applications.
The applicants in the general category need to deposit Tk 3, 450 per passport and they are issued the passports within 21 to 30 days if the police reports are available in due time. But it is delayed for seven to 10 days in case of delay in getting the police reports.
"As soon as we get clearance from the police we work on the passports to hand them over to their owners at the earliest," he said.
The office said that 387 applications were regretted in the last calendar year for problems in submission of government fee while 791 applicants were regretted as the police verification reports went against them.
The Chittagong Regional Passport Office earned Tk 362.76 million on account of machine readable passports and Tk 17.944 million from machine readable visas (MRV) during the period from January 1 to December 31 in 2017.
The revenue from the MRP issuance in the previous calendar year (2016) was Tk 336.59 million, sources said.
Applicants who received passports on Thursday told this correspondent inside the office that the common people are now free from hassles in the passport office. People get forms from the concerned desk, get them filled in and deposit along with the banks slips on the same day
without interference of the brokers.
Once held hostage in the hands of the middlemen, the regional passport office is now free of the so-called 'helpers' or touts, said Md Yusuf, who submitted the applications along with other members of his family.
They deposited the applications and within 10 minutes were advised to get upstairs for doing the finger prints and related works which were also completed within 15 to 20 minutes.
A very different scene was sighted in the passport office located at Panchlaish area in the city on Thursday. Years back, the office was dominated by dozens of brokers who stopped the common people arriving with applications for passports at the entrance of the office.
About 100 brokers opened their make-shift offices outside the entrance of the office who had maintained close contacts with the officers and clerks of the passport office for getting their works done for Tk 1, 000 to Tk 1, 500 per passport.
The brokers used to offer help in filling up passport forms, deposit the same to the concerned desks and get the passports ready in exchange of money ranging from Tk 15, 000 to Tk 25, 000 per passport although the government fee per passport is Tk 3,500.
In the past, the officers and employees of the passport office used to ask the people seeking passports to submit applications through the brokers and not directly to the offices.
But now the system has fully changed. Eight to 10 thousand applications are being filed with the passport offices under different areas in the city and upazilas of the district every month, sources in the office said.
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