The delegation to be led by Joint Secretary A Manickam at the Visa and Passport Division of the Indian foreign ministry was supposed to hold talks on passports with officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA). The talks were supposed to pave way for a possible agreement between Nepal and India on machine readable passports. [break]
"The delegation was due to visit on Sunday but I do not know whether they arrived or not," said Mohan Krishna Shrestha, the chief of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told myrepublica.com on Sunday.
But a knowledgeable source at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the delegation canceled its visit citing lack of a clear-cut cabinet decision on procuring machine readable passports specifically from India.
"The delegation will visit Nepal only after the cabinet takes a formal decision to procure machine readable passports from India," the source said on condition of anonymity.
- The delegation will visit Nepal only after the cabinet takes a formal decision to procure machine readable passports from India. -- Government source
- Cancellation of the visit by the Indian delegation has made Nepal´s prospect of meeting the April-1 ICAO deadline for machine readable passports further uncertain.
The cabinet last Thursday returned a MoFA proposal about awarding the MRP printing contract to India saying that the ministry should introduce MRP by April 1 through a bilateral agreement in a cost-effective manner. The cabinet did not specify the country that should be awarded the contract.
Cancellation of the visit by the Indian delegation, which was supposed to lead MoFA officials to present yet another proposal to the cabinet for procuring Nepali machine readable passports from the southern neighbor, has made Nepal´s prospect of meeting the April-1 ICAO deadline for machine readable passports further uncertain.
Nepal is 31 days away from introducing the high-tech machine readable passports as traditional non-machine readable passports to be issued after March 31 will not be acceptable for international travel.
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