The National Assembly was informed on Monday that from April 2016 it will be possible to register for passports online, and they could also be issued in the same manner.
Minister for Interior Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said this while responding to a question in the National Assembly. He said initially, the online system would be introduced within the country, and at a later stage, it would be expanded to cover other countries as well.
Presently, 83 Pakistani missions in other countries are issuing machine-readable passports. He said somewhere in the middle of next year, online applications for passports would be received by these missions.
He said that the discretionary power of the interior minister was misused in the past to relax rules for issuing blue passports. The present government cancelled two thousand passports because of public interest.
Nisar said that the online application, and issuance of national identity cards, has already begun. However, the process would take a few months more to consolidate. He said hundreds of thousands of fake identity cards have been revoked and action has been taken against officials of NADRA.
Replying to a supplementary about blocking identity cards, the minister said a committee consisting of members representing different parliamentary parties would be formed to sort out the issue with NADRA.
Parliamentary Secretary for Finance Rana Muhammad Afzal told the House that the number of taxpayers has gone up from 711,000 to over one million during the last two years.
He said tax collection has also gone up by Rs 644 billion during this period, representing an increase of 33 per cent. He said that the collection of direct taxes is also significantly high during the current financial year as compared to the corresponding months of the last financial year.
To another question, he said targets of the first five months of the current financial year were missed mainly due to the low growth in the collection of sales tax because of huge decline in prices of POL products.
He informed the House that loans worth $24.844 billion are payable by the country to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank and International Fund for Agricultural Development.
He said that net domestic loans borrowed by the present government are at about Rs 2760 billion. Debt servicing on these loans is Rs 650 billion. The parliamentary secretary said over Rs 78 billion worth of loans were written-off by all banks and Development Financial Institutions during the last five years.
