A common mans visits to the passport office are more often than not marred by uncooperative staff, long waiting queues and unruly crowdsand if this was not enough, the touts waiting outside the office to pounce on him makes him drop all thoughts of pursuing the matter any further. Even if he gives up and falls into the tout-trap, his passport takes at least a month to be delivered.

But one cannot always blame the passport office staffthe number of passports issued went up 2.2 times between 1997 to 2007, and by 2011, the demand would go up to 1 crore. So have the number of passport offices gone up proportionately? No. There continue to be thirty-seven offices, putting considerable strain on manpower and infrastructure, leading to inevitable delays and headaches. However, the Central Passport Organization managed to increase output and issued about 50 lakh passports in 2007 as compared to around 35 lakh in 2005.

Even though most passport offices are fully computerized, there is a growing need to make available services like real-time online tracking of status of applications; an effective enquiry and grievance redressal system; digital photo capture; and biometric passports.

It is to address issues like these and many more that the Indian government decided to launch the ambitious Passport Seva Project. The objective behind the project is to deliver all passport-related services to citizens in a timely, transparent, accessible, and reliable manner; and in a comfortable environment through streamlined processes, says Dr TV Nagendra Prasad, director (PV) & project director (Passport Seva Project).

The project is the second Mision Mode Project under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) after MCA 21. The project is a service delivery transformation project where it involves complete paradigm shift in service delivery experience of passport applicants, says Tanmoy Chakrabarty, vice president & head, government industry solutions Unit, Tata Consultancy Services.

The Passport Seva Project was conceived in the second half of 2006 for a comprehensive reform of the passport issuance system. And following the cabinets approval of the project in September 2007 through an open tender process, TCS was selected as the service provider of the project.

The entire project is being implemented on the Public Private Partnership mode with TCS making the investments upfront on all non-strategic infrastructure, software development, training, and change management. TCS meanwhile would be paid on a quarterly basis by the MEA after fulfilling the twenty-eight SLAs including customer friendliness, cleanliness of the premise to technical aspects.

Elaborating on the role of TCS, Chakrabarty says that as the prime IT partner of the project, we would be involved right from building applications to setting up secure data centers, disaster recovery centers and call center for applicants.

Salient Features
With the first phase expected to be completed by January 2010, four pilot Passport Seva Kendras (PSKs) would be established at Chandigarh, Bangalore and New Delhi. Under the project, TCS would be required to open 77 PSKs across India. In all 77 PSKs, customer service and satisfaction would be the key factor, says Chakrabarty.

And once the project is completed, new passports would be issued in three days time while in cases requiring police verification, within three days after the completion of the process.

Explaining the design of the project, Prasad says that it ensures that only support functions like improving citizen interface, managing technology backbone, call centers, training and change management would be provided by TCS. While the government would continue to exercise all sovereign and security related functions in the passport issuance process. The MEA is in the process of setting up a Special Purpose Vehicle to manage and exercise strategic control over the operations of the project, he adds.

Considering that most passport office employees have to perform under pressure handling large workloads, the project has taken into account these concerns and includes a productivity-linked incentive scheme for the employees. Police verification would be expedited through electronic linkage of the district police headquarters with the passport seva portal.

On the technical front, the project envisages creation of an all India data center, disaster recovery center, and networking between all passport offices and an electronic file system for passport processing running nationwide across the entire organization.

Security Aspects
In the past, incidents of terrorists getting passports issued from Indian passport offices have jeopardized the nations security and have also put a question mark over the passport offices credibility. With the launch of the Passport Seva Project, the same. A lot of thought has therefore gone into addressing the security concerns.

The entire data of the Passport Seva System including personal information including the biometric information of applicants, would be residing in the data center and the disaster recovery center which would be located in the premises belonging to the MEA. And the operation of these centers would be under the MEA through a project management unit.

As PSKs are the extended arms of the Central Passport Organization, they would be headed by a senior officer of the CPO at each center. TCS would only be responsible for handling visitors and capturing data relating to passport applications. Activities like document verification, indexing and granting would be done by the same government employees who are doing this now, using advanced IT tools. There would be partitioning of the LAN at each of the PSKs between the officials of the CPO and the operators of TCS. Also, government counters in PSKs would be in an area distinctly marked for them from private counters of service providers.

The sensitive function of handling blank passport booklets would also remain with government employees. The data coming into TCS at the time of submission of application would be used only to feed into the database; thereafter the data would no longer be available to the TCS staff.

Benefiting the Citizens
Considering that most of us have had to spend anywhere around 1-2 months running around the passport office and more often than not giving up in the process, one of the single biggest advantage of the Passport Seva project would be saving of the citizens time and effort.

Moreover, there will be service provisioning within defined service levels, availability of portfolio of on-line services with real-time status tracking and enquiry including payment of fee on-line, an effective system of grievance redressal, and a strict adherence to first-in-first out principle in rendering of services.

For the passport office employees too, the project would bring in uniform and simple work procedure, skill enhancement through training, better accountability, incentives for higher productivity, increased promotion opportunities, et al

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in