Officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) and Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) said that there is a stock of 603,000 traditional passports, including 340,250 passports in possession of the MoFA alone as at Sunday. This number excludes the passports in stock in 75 district administration offices, according to MoHA spokesman Jaya Mukunda Khanal. [break]
They said that these passports must be issued by March 31 as non-machine readable passports to be issued after that will not be valid for international travel as per the provision of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN agency.
The government will have to issue around 15,868 passports per day if it wants to finish the current stock in the next 38 days starting Monday. But it is almost next to impossible to do so given the present daily average issuance of 5,000 copies of passports across the country.
A calculation by myrepublica.com shows that the MoFA will have to destroy around 413,000 copies of traditional passports that will remain unused by April 1, when the ICAO provision for machine-readable passport becomes effective.
As a member of the UN agency, Nepal has committed to ICAO to introduce machine-readable passports by April 1. But the traditional passports issued before March 31 will be considered valid till November 24, 2015.
At present a Nepali national has been paying Rs 5,000 for a passport. Given this price, Nepal will lose around Rs 2.65 billion rupees in revenue in the traditional passports that will go to waste.
Though the concerned officials knew about the April 1 deadline as early as five years ago, MoFA had got one million copies of passports printed from an Indonesian firm in April last year. Had the officials demonstrated far-sightedness in their policy on passports, the country could have saved huge amount of state funds.
MoFA Secretary Madan Kumar Bhattarai, defending the healthy stock of passports, said the ministry had experienced crisis of passports in the past and just wanted to maintain a good stock of passports to avoid any shortage.
Bhattarai said his ministry is planning to come up with an incentive to attract people to the traditional non-machine readable passports.
"We are coming up with an incentive so as to ensure that a maximum number of passports are used by March 31," Bhattarai told myrepublica.com.
An official at the ministry said that they are planning to issue passports even on government holidays besides offering discounts ranging from Rs 1,500 to 2,000 per passport. The ministry has already sent a proposal to the Finance Ministry requesting permission for discounts. But the latter has yet to respond to the proposal, according to the official.
kiran@myrepublica.com
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