KARACHI:
Karachi passport office on Monday appeared to be flooded with a horde of impatient men: nudging, falling, trying to reach out to the manager who was single-handedly controlling the restless crowd, according to sources.
Syed Abbas Jafri had reached the passport office before its opening time on Friday hoping to get his application processed swiftly, only to find that none of the systems was working.
Jafri claimed that he had waited for 90 minutes in the office and it wasn’t working. Jafri had already paid the fees for the passport but the photo counter, biometrics and data entry weren’t working.
“The passport office is closed over the weekend so I came in early today again, but there’s no proper system in place for people whose applications have been pending since Friday,” he stated.
In the south zone hall, there is no queue for those whose passport applications had been left incomplete; the managers try in vain to go by the token number system but the crowd has become unmanageable.
The management has devised a procedure for the ones who had to return again on Monday to complete the process, but none seemed to follow it in the south zone hall leading to the chaos.
