I remember a relative of mine had to go for Umrah in year 2012 and I had to look for a powerful resource in the Passport and Immigration Office in order to acquire that passport. A great number of similar stories must be heard by you as well. People then had to suffer in the long queues of several offices, amongst them the most notorious was Passport and Immigration Department. People who even applied for executive/urgent category of passports were unable to succeed in acquiring the travel documents.
To my surprise I was informed that by the dawn of 2013 standing backlog that mounted to 531,434 has been cleared with effective strategy and policymaking of the Ministry of Interior. The past two Hajj occasions have been unprecedented in this regard where the pilgrims smoothly went through processing and receiving their passports pretty much on the dates suggested by the respective authorities.
Not only clearing the backlog but also the extension in the validity period from five to ten years is a boon of luxury for the citizens of Pakistan. It is both time and economically savvy for the general public. Few more constructive steps that addressed the major public woes include creating an online tracking system for checking the status of the travel document in which approximately one million cases have been addressed so far; 1.8million complaints have been resolved through the SMS service; eliminating agent mafia and further curbing this illness through round the clock CCTVs from HQs which has further reduced the recurrence of episodes of misconduct with public to bare minimum.
I feel that if the same spirit of provision of civic service culture is maintained then it is not far away when we will be proud to have a green passport.
SEEMAB ALI
Islamabad