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Take it Online

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) official heading the Passport Department was recently quoted as saying that MFA would like to open online application for machine readable passport (MRP). It is great news for millions of Nepalis who are denied passports on time.

The history of Nepal government-issued travel documents, especially MRP, has been of agony and so frustrating at times that some Nepali workers abroad have had to lose their jobs because they could not obtain their passports on time. The procedure of obtaining passport is so complex and time consuming that one cannot be sure one will receive it even after 5 to 6 months of application.


The MFA’s claim that it delivers passports within three months of application is highly questionable.
Let me begin with the process of submission of applications, which are acceptable at all 75 district administration offices in Nepal and all 32 diplomatic missions abroad. Once collected, such applications are dispatched to the Passport Department in Kathmandu.

This system of transporting the hard copies of application forms, either from district headquarters or foreign-based Nepali missions, is not efficient. The receiving office for such applications takes its own sweet time to send them to Kathmandu. There are no time limits here. The dispatch is delayed as there are many application forms to deliver. In case of Nepali diplomatic missions abroad, the diplomatic bags carrying application forms are not sent even once a fortnight, which means that applicants’ documents seldom reach the concerned office on time.

The same arrangement is in place for distributing the prepared passports. It involves countless unnecessary delays before the applicants can finally lay their hands on the desired documents. Once ready, passports are sent back to the offices that collected the application forms; this process might alone take a whole month.
But the real pain is not even the long delay in application and delivery of passports. There is a strong possibility that hand-written applications will be rejected when they are screened in the computers in passport department, for a variety of reasons, for instance not meeting specifications on photo size and color.

Passport applications may be discarded because of faulty information provided in the application forms, which are in most cases filled up by the ‘legal assistants’ who hover around district administration offices. The applicants are victimized for no mistake of their own as photo studios assure them that photographs will meet specifications; but these studios are not accountable if forms are rejected due to wrong photos. Or the assistants filling up the forms may inadvertently supply wrong information (while copying from the citizenship certificate or old passport) leading to the rejection of application.

The applicants do not know about the rejection of their forms until months later, the passport department sends back the rejected forms to the point of collection. Consider the fate of a young Nepali entrepreneur based in Shanghai, who was informed of the rejection after many months of application submission and that too when the applicant himself called to inquire about the status of his application. This undoubtedly reflects poorly on our diplomatic missions abroad.

An evidence of utter lack of proficiency on the part of our diplomatic staff is narrated by another victim in the US. Having waited for months and months for her MRP to arrive, this applicant was shocked to get an official envelop that was supposed to contain her passport absolutely empty!

The tale of suffering related to passports do not end here as Nepali citizens applying through our foreign missions have to pay exorbitant rates, which are charged in expensive currencies like US dollar in America and British Pound in the UK. For example in order to get passports from our missions in New York and Washington DC applicants pay US $150 per passport, plus the mailing fees.

If a Nepali citizen from, say, St. Louis has to apply at New York or Washington DC mission, he or she has to cover mailing charges for the diplomatic missions to sent the passport to the applicant’s home address. One wonders why the concerned diplomatic missions at least don’t cover mailing charges in sending back the passport to its holder at home address, particularly after it has charged the recipient triple the normal fee of $ 50.

Based on the recent observation of the Chief of Passport Department discussed above, I believe the government has to at once make available funds for new technology. If financial resources are in short supply, there are ways to overcome the hurdle. The election government has been misusing state funds by authorizing unnecessary medical checkups of the ‘royals’ of republican Nepal (the president and a retinue of political leaders and their kith and kin) in expensive hospitals in Japan, Singapore and the US. Such unnecessary spending can be diverted for utilization in more important areas like timely passport delivery.

The adoption of online passport application system will result in multiple benefits. There will be no need for the applicants to be physically present just to submit application forms; there will be no need to deploy extra personnel to manage the serpentine lines of passport applicants seen every day in front of offices, particularly the Department of Passport in Kathmandu; application forms will be received by the concerned office (Passport Department in Kathmandu) instantly and thus save plenty of precious time; rejection of applications due to photos not meeting requirements as well as due to wrong information would be minimized; and lastly, applicants living abroad will know the status of their applications when the document is being processed and they will get a fair idea of when they can expect the delivery of their passports.

With these arrangements, passport preparation time would be drastically cut and passport delivery would be made more efficient.
The introduction of such a system of collecting and screening passport applications would easily be one of the most significant public service contributions of the current election government. Let’s hope that the government embarks upon this worthy (and very much deliverable) goal of delivering passports within a month of application, sooner rather than later.