Ahmedabad, 15 August, 2011

As per the minister of state in the ministry of External affairs SMT. Preneet Kaur’s recent reply to a question in parliament, Gujarat will get five Passport Seva Kendras(PSK) in October this year as per the central government’s tentative schedule for operationalising the PSKs in the country. While two PSKs in Gujarat will open in Ahmedabad, one each will be opened in Rajkot, Vadodara and Surat. At present eleven PSKs are functional in India which are Bangalore (2), Hubli, Mangalore, Chandigarh, Ambala, Ludhiana, Tiruchirappalli, Thanjavur, Madurai and Tirunelvelli.

The PSP is one of the 27 Mission Mode Projects under the e-Governance programme of the Govt of India. The Project aims at delivering all passport related services to the citizens in a timely, transparent, more accessible, comfortable and reliable manner. The verification of the applicants’ personal particulars will be expedited through electronic linkage of the Project’s portal with the police authorities in the Districts and State capitals, to reduce the delay in verification process. The benefits to the citizens would be service provisioning within defined service levels, closer and larger number of access points for services, availability of a portfolio of on-line services with real-time status tracking and inquiry, 24 x 7 call centre with facility to obtain information in vernacular language, an effective system of grievance redressal, adherence to the ‘First in-First out’ principle in rendering the services and facility of child care and refreshments at the PSKs. The number of public dealing counters will go up from the current 350 to 1610 and public dealing hours will go up from the current 4 hours to 7 hours. The matter of opening more Passport Offices and PSKs in the country would be looked into after complete roll-out of the Passport Seva Project involving operationalisation of 77 PSKs.

Tentative schedule for internationalizing the PSKs :

August, 2011: Delhi (1), Gurgaon, Chennai (3), Coimbatore, Vishakhapatnam, Nizamabad, Tirupati, Vijaywada.

September, 2011: Amritsar, Jalandhar (2), Hoshiarpur.

October, 2011: Hyderabad (3), Ghaziabad, Ahmedabad (2), Rajkot, Baroda, Surat.

November, 2011: Delhi (1), Cochin, Cochin (Rural), Alapuzha, Kottayam, Thrissur, Thiruvananthapuram, Thiruvananthapuram Rural, Kollam, Malappuram, Kolkata, Berhampore.

December, 2011: Kozhikode (2), Kannur (2), Mumbai (3), Thane, Pune, Nagpur,Nashik.

January, 2012: Jaipur, Sikar, Jodhpur, Patna, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Lucknow, Kanpur, Bareilly, Bhopal, Jammu, Srinagar, Dehradun, Shimla, Raipur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Panaji and Guwahati.