Odisha: Police verification for passports to be quicker
BHUBANESWAR: To cut down on delays in police verification for fresh and renewal of passports, the Odisha Police has planned to provide tablets with mPassport Seva mobile application installed in them to all the police stations in the State.
The tablets have already been procured and will be distributed to every police station soon. Everything will be done digitally, starting from verification to sending the reports to the SPs, said the officer.
Currently, police verification for a passport takes 40 to 45 days but in the new system, the process will be completed within five to 10 days. “Our efforts are to improve the passport verification timelines and move from manual to digital mode by March end,” a senior police officer of Odisha Police Headquarters told TNIE. He pointed out that for passport verification, there is a lot of delay during the manual transfer of files from the offices of district SPs to the police stations and back.
There are over 600 police stations in Odisha. Last year, the regional passport office had sent over 1.20 lakh applications for police verification which also included applications for renewal of passports. At present, verification applications are sent by the regional passport office to each district SP office online. The documents are downloaded and sent to the police station concerned manually. The police stations return the applications to the SP office manually and then they are sent to the passport office online.
Director General of Police (DGP) Abhay on Wednesday reviewed the implementation of the mPassport Seva mobile application in a meeting via video-conferencing with all the senior officers of Odisha Police.
Abhay also reviewed the implementation of the single emergency helpline number 112 to provide immediate assistance to people in distress. A call to 112 will provide emergency services such as police, ambulance, fire, health, women and child safety under a Centre-sponsored scheme that is already functional in several states. The single emergency helpline number is expected to be operational soon.