It is a good news coming from the Indian government. Now, passport police verification process will be easier and faster because it will be online. Starting from November, the hard copies of passport verification report (PVR) will be sent online. So, it will take only less than a week. Earlier, it used to take around 20 days in the whole process.
Pune will be the first country to adopt this online police verification process.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was very keen to to fastening the passport process. He directed external affairs and home ministries to talk with TCS (which manages the whole passport process) and see how the time could be reduced. TCS has made few changes the software to cut time in sending and uploading hard copies.
The home ministry is also working to allow all SP-level police officers access to databases such as National Population Register (NPR), Aadhaar and Electoral Photo I-Card via the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS). With the access to these databases, police officials will be able to check online verification of identity, address and criminal record of the passport applicant. This will also reduce time and effort both. So, cops can quickly send reports.
“We hope to have the online system for police verification in place by November. We expect the funding under CCTNS, which was not allocated any resources in this year’s budget, to be cleared after the PM returns from his foreign tour. It will take us another 3-4 months to integrate the databases and have the technical infrastructure in place,” a senior home ministry official said.
For now, online check will also be backed up with the physical check. But slowly the physical check will be removed from this process.
This will also remove the corruption in the passport police verification. Usually, there are two verifications and passport applicant is demanded from rs. 500-Rs. 5000 for clearing the report. If applicant denied, he is threatened for putting bad report. Yes, I paid around Rs. 3000 bribe for my passport verification while I have every papers fine. Police officials said that they will return my report if I didn’t give them the demanded money. He also claimed that the money is not bribe, it is the passport verification fee which every applicant has to pay.
I hope this new online process will remove that bribe or passport verification fee.
