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Nepal's post-pandemic passport predicament With Nepal opening up back up to international travel with the rest of the world, many Nepalis are trying to get their passports or renew their old ones. But many are stuck and appalled at the situation as they line up in the thousands every day for their passports in central Nepal.
While many government officials have announced and tried to make aware that people do not need to come to Kathmandu for their passports, they can apply and receive their passports from 60 district-level administration offices. But 13 out of the 60 offices have been reported to not have been started operation yet. And other district offices which are responsible for giving out passports have been experiencing staff shortages and can only give out about 30-40 passports per day.
Officials from the Department of Passports (DoP) have said that this overcrowding in the main office has been caused by two reasons: disruption in district-level passport distribution and the introduction of e-passports. Moreover, the ministry has suggested managing crowds either by deploying its staff or outsourcing some of the peripheral tasks to private sector firms to reduce the hassles of service seekers.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have connected the cause of the current crowding and mismanagement to the introduction of the e-passport, relocation of the passport department to Tripureshwar from Narayanhiti Palace and the sudden resumption of foreign employment with the easing of COVID-19 restrictions.
The ministry has elucidated that the passport department is still in a transitional phase after moving away from machine-readable passports to e-passports. With many coming out to receive their passports after receiving the newly-introduced national ID cards alongside the surge of Nepali students going to foreign universities has caused a spike in demand.
With the central department's ability to service only 1,000 passports a day yet getting 5,000 passports requests per day, have been incredibly constrained with the staff of 77 being understaffed for this job. And the people working at the central passport office in Kathmandu have sent a written request to Home Ministry for more human resources but have met with no response while the Foreign Ministry has been working out to fix this problem by themselves.
The department has publicly announced that they are aware of the issue and that if the numbers pile upon the central office that the ministry will intervene and that the response will be decided by next week. But with a senior official in the Home Ministry putting this responsibility on the Foreign Ministry to tackle the issue, it is yet to be seen what will be done to resolve this problem.
Photo Credit: [Department of Passport Facebook]
