NEW DELHI: A new app developed by the external affairs ministry and rolled out in New Delhi is expected to cut the time for police verification of passport applicants to five days and reduce the scope for misuse of the process, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.
The “mPassport Police App, developed by the consular, passport and visa division of the external affairs ministry for law enforcement agencies, is being rolled out along with 350 tablets to personnel of the Special Branch of Delhi Police. These personnel are responsible for carrying out verification of antecedents of passport applicants.
Police verification continues to be one of the most time-consuming processes in applying for a passport and the new app is expected to cut the time taken for this – 15 days – by two-thirds, the people cited above said. This process is also linked to a number of complaints about its misuse and the app will help tackle this issue by ensuring greater transparency, the people said.
Abhishek Dubey, the regional passport officer (RPO) for Delhi, said in a statement: “Police verification is an integral part of passport issuance system. Various steps have been taken to streamline and expedite the process. To further expedite the process, the ministry of external affairs (MEA) introduced ‘mPassport Police App’.”
On the occasion of Delhi Police’s raising day on February 16, home minister Amit Shah dedicated 350 tablets for the personnel of Delhi Police’s Special Branch. “This would result in the entire process of police verification and submission report [becoming] digital and paperless,” Dubey said.
“The process of verification using tablets is slated to reduce the verification time from 15 days to five days…This would effectively reduce the passport issuance timeline by 10 days,” he added.
The people said GPS and geo-tagging while using the tablets will establish whether police officials actually visited the applicant’s home for verification. Besides making the verification process more accurate and speedier, the tablets will allow the secure submission of documents in a digital format.
“The final verification report will be immediately and directly sent to senior police officials and this will remove several unnecessary layers of the current verification process,” one of the people said.
Officials described the deployment of the app and tablets as an example of SMART (sensitive and strict, modern with mobility, alert and accountable, reliable and responsive, trained and tech-savvy) policing.
According to statistics on the external affairs ministry’s website, the average time taken nationwide for issuing passports has been cut from 16 days in 2014 to six days in 2022. More than 4.35 million passports were issued across the country during 2022.