Digital India: Passport verification now goes online in Maximum City
Giving a new fillip to the ambitious drive of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship ‘Digital India’ Programme, the process of passport verification has been made digital in Mumbai. Now the details of passport applicants are being stored in tablets for further verification.
The tedious process of passport verification has been fast tracked in Mumbai, as each police station in SoBo and several other police stations covering posh area of Mumbai is now equipped with one tablet in which the officer can fill up the forms quickly in the gadget with subject to his senior subordinate to review the verification.
The police verification requests are transferred online to the concerned police station by the Regional Passport Office (RPO) after they get an online application for the passport.
The pilot project soon will be come into force in all the police stations of Mumbai.
A senior IPS officer told the Free Press Journal that the new process is helping officers to cut short the verification time.
“The process, which is operational for the last one month in the city specially in South Mumbai, will soon be adopted by all the police stations. Earlier, the police verification officer had to fill up the form on a piece of paper. But now the officer who visits the residential address of applicant, feed their thumbprint as well as photo in the tablet,” he said.
The officer further added that the digitisation has helped weeding out corruption with the elimination of middleman’s involvement. Also, it is giving much relief to senior citizens, women as well as children who earlier had to visit police station to wait in a long queue for police verification for passport.
“Earlier people, specially women and senior citizen, used to complain that they don’t have time to visit police station to wait for long queue for police verification. But the procedure is now easier and convenient. It is win-win situation for verification officer as well as for the applicants,” added the officer, who added that now only the applicant has to visit police station once for the verification of his documents.
Each police station in South Mumbai and several other police stations covering posh areas of Mumbai is now equipped with one tablet in which the verification officer fills up the forms quickly in the gadget subject to his senior subordinate to review the verification