No need to visit police station for passport verification
Citizens welcome CP Sanjay Pandey’s twitter announcement; constables say will increase their work load
City Commissioner of Police Sanjay Pandey on Saturday announced that citizens will no longer be required to go to police stations for passport verification, except in exceptional cases of documents being incomplete.
The IPS officer, who has created a flutter with his interactive communication with citizens using social media, said the local police station will send a constable to the residence of the citizen for verification.
“Constable who will come to your house will do all the work. He is competent. You may get called in only if there is a discrepancy but not as a norm,” he said in tweets that went viral immediately, and generated over 500 responses from citizens congratulating him for the initiative.
“These changes are worth its weight in 24 carat gold. God bless you for thinking and acting from a common man’s perspective,” reacted the official handle of Andheri Lokhandwala and Oshiwara
Versova Residents’ Organisation.
The police personnel engaged in passport verification said it could increase the logistics for the local police, and may increase the pendency of cases. “How many homes can one police constable visit in a day? At the police station, we process an average of up to 50 cases daily, and forward the application to the Special Branch which routes it to the regional passport office,” said one police constable.
Another said, “There is a difference between paying a home visit for verification and summoning the person to the police station. If the person indeed has something to hide, a police station visit changes his or her body language and can be easily detected.”
Asked if this wouldn’t place additional burden on overworked personnel, Pandey told the Free Press Journal that earlier the police personnel were anyway visiting homes and then directing citizens to the police station with documents. “So we just removed one step,” he said.