It is nothing like allowing whitening of undisclosed money in budget or introducing articulated buses on city streets. Getting a passport is a citizen right. People are supposed to get them without any hassle if they fulfil all the conditions.
But those who went through the process of availing a passport said it was one of the most lengthy and painful experiences that one could imagine.
The government introduced the machine-readable passport (MRP) system in 2010 to get rid of the age old system of analogue passports.
But after three years, the central passport office in the capital’s Agargaon has gone back to square one. Passport seekers are having to face the same old problems: snail’s pace; brokers at large; deliberate negligence of corrupt officials; and so on.
The labyrinthine compound of the office itself is a problem for the passport-seekers.
For getting the initial application through, one has to stand in at least three to five excruciatingly long queues, and sometimes learn after reaching the end of it that there is a problem with the papers, hence has to start over after getting the error sorted.
The fact that there is no designated information office or person to tell people the exact procedure, makes life even harder for the seekers.
There was a time when the money that the passport seekers have to deposit as issuance fee, could be paid in a booth inside the compound.
But a few months back, the authorities removed that booth and now the passport seekers need to walk nearly half a kilometre for depositing the fee to the nearest branch of Sonali Bank.
Jannatul Ferdous, a resident of the capital, finally got her hands on the “urgent” passport after 10 days of applying. An urgent passport is supposed to be delivered in three days for the payment of additional fees.
“I thought the system improved after the launching of MRP and after the army took over. I had to spend the whole day under scorching sun standing in several long queues,” she said.
Apart from the sun, the heat of the brokers often get unbearable for the people standing in long queues. They keep bothering and trying to convince people that they can get things done really quickly for some payment because they have connections inside the office.
This reporter found one such broker offering an applicant the facility of attesting his photograph with a fake seal for Tk300.
Law enforcers have from time to time rounded up many of these brokers who, after coming out serving short jail terms, start over.
After getting through all the formalities at the office and getting the application into the system, there is no scope of relaxing for the applicant.
There are allegations that the officers of Special Branch (SB) of Police, who do the security verification for passport, extort and harass applicants in the name of verification.
Alpana Akhter who, along with her son, applied for urgent passports, said: “After five days one man came to our house and showed an error with my son’s application. We paid him Tk1,000, but he insisted for more.”
There is a general perception that people must have close connections either inside the passport office or in the army or high up in the government or pay bribes for getting a passport. Nazrul Islam, deputy director of the Department of Immigration and Passports, denied all the allegations.
He said: “They have already set up two more offices in Dhaka – one in Jatrabari and another in Uttara – in addition to our main regional office in Agargoan to facilitate the smooth issuance of passports.”
He assured that appropriate measures would be taken if anyone filed any specific complaint about any irregularity.