Chandigarh, September 3
The government’s flagship e-governance programme, Passport Seva Project, will become functional by October this year. The Rs 1,000 crore project, which promises to issue passport within three days, will first go live at Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Ambala in North India and at Bengaluru, Mangalore and Hubli in South India.

After the pilots at these six cities have been successfully implemented, these will be launched at 77 other centres across India. These centres will be established sometime next year, and will service the entire country.

With the successful implementation of this project, passport-related services will be delivered to citizens in a timely, more accessible and reliable manner. As part of the project, initial scrutiny of the application forms, acceptance of fee, scanning of documents and taking of photographs will take place at these passport facilitation centres. Though these centres will be run by Tata Consultancy Services, these will also deploy government staff to verify the documents and decide on granting of passport. The other activities such as printing and dispatch of passports will also be done there.

As of date, the average time now taken to issue fresh passports is 45 days and for re-issue is 15 days. With the Passport Seva Project, citizens can expect to get their passports within three days of applying for the document. Police verification will be expedited through electronic linkage of the centres with the police authorities in state capitals. In case of Tatkal scheme, the passport will be issued within a day.

Though initially the project was to be implemented by June this year, it has delayed by a few months because of the delay in drafting of the software requirement specification (SRS) document and in handing over the records of 80 million passports by the Ministry of External Affairs to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which is implementing the project. “These glitches have now been solved, and we will be ready to go live at Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Ambala, Bengaluru, Mangalore and Hubli in October,” said Tanmoy Chakrabarthy, vice-president and head of Global Government Industry Group, Tata Consultancy Services.

He also said that while the main data centre is ready, the disaster recovery centre was taking a lot of time to be set up. “Since it is too risky to start the project without a back-up data centre, we had to wait till the time this was ready,” he said.