NEW DELHI: On July 1, Bangalore resident Babu Krishnan got a passport issued in the name of his 10-year-old daughter. Rather than being elated, his immediate reaction was puzzlement—his daughter had got another exact passport delivered from the passport office, just 15 days ago.
His is not an isolated case. In September 2010, a businessman of the same city, Manjunath Ramachandra, had applied for a passport for his three-year-old son. The boy got not just one passport, but two—issued and delivered to his house in a gap of five months.
Raising serious security concerns, duplicate passports have been issued to several applicants in Bangalore through the newly-launched fast-track online system, Passport Seva Project, due to some glitch in the software.
According to sources, scores of duplicate passports have been surrendered to various passport offices in Bangalore, which were delivered to the applicants.
A senior MEA official told The Sunday Standard that during the pilot project stage, they had noticed the technical glitch which led to issuance of duplicate passports. “But, all those cases had been caught in the office. None of them had been delivered,” he said. But, in both the cases available with this paper, the passports were couriered to the addresses.
Babu Krishnan had submitted the passport application for his daughter, Rakshit Babu, through the online process at the Lalbagh office on May 20.
Within a month, the passport (J7792170) was delivered at his residence, and the second one (J7093331) arrived on July 1. “Both of them had the exact same details… I have surrendered the second one. The RPO people told me it was an unfortunate mistake,” Krishnan said.
Ramachandra had first applied manually for his son, Shreeadithya Manjunath Kashyap, in September 2010. “But when I tried to track the file online, there was no sign of the application. Nobody in the RPO could explain what has happened to it,” said Ramachandra.