LAHORE: Passport applicants may not be able to benefit from the home delivery service announced last year under a project by the Directorate General of Immigration and Passport Islamabad owing to, as per officials, non-seriousness of authorities and technical hurdles.

The facility was aimed at discouraging corrupt officials and touts and providing an opportunity to applicants to get their passports without any hassle. The directorate general had published in the press a tender notice for procurement of courier services for machine readable passports initially in six major districts of Pakistan in November 2013. But officials said the project announced byformer director general Sikandar Sultan Raja came to an embarrassing halt after his transfer and discontinuity of departmental policies by the acting DG, who is actually the project director of machine readable passports, officials added.

They were of the view the project was not really successful because of chances of submission of fake fee challans, incomplete mailing addresses of applicants, fake whereabouts and manual checking of bank credit scrolls.

They said a proposal to charge Rs270 as courier charges from each applicant was also dropped soon after the transfer of former DG Raja, who was actively pursuing the project.

According to a field official, the project was not possible mainly be-cause the National Bank of Pakistan which was authorised to collect passport fee was not providing online services, and bank credit scrolls -a list of total fee challans in each branch of the bank were handled manually by bank officials as well as passport officials to verify fee deposit, which was time-consuming.

He said a passport could not be issued to any applicant until verification and a tally by three stakeholders -the bank, passport office and district treasurer. He added the verification of scrolls of the banks that were situated away from passport offices took around four days.

The official said the issuance of passport had been stopped in certain cases in the past wherein applicants submitted challans with fake bank stamps or did not mentionproper personal details.

The official said the service could be provided only if the NBP, which also collected Rs30 per challan from an applicant without any legal cover, started online service so all stakeholders could verify submission of fee online.

Another official said sometimes mailing addresses of applicants on their computerised national identity card was incomplete, a problem that was needed to be rectified by the National Database and Registration Authority before launching the delivery service.

He said the project if implemented in future after certain rectifications would redress woes of applicants who complained the staff demanded bribes for handing over passports.