Lack of adequate manpower and machineries have led to a huge backlog of unprocessed requests for machine readable passports (MRP) at the Bangladeshi embassy in Oman forcing expatriates to wait way beyond the delivery deadline.
Even in urgent cases, passport seekers cannot be served, an embassy source said, requesting anonymity.
The embassy in Muscat recieves around 300 applications for passport renewal, and of the applicants, around 100-120 request for MRPs. However, at its current capacity, the embassy can only process 60-70 MRPs daily leading to at least 50 applications piling up each day.
The Bangladeshi embassy launched MRP services in the country in January 2012 and with the amount of back log, currently, an MRP applicant has to wait for around 90 days before it is issued.
One such applicant, Mohammad Chowdhury, has been waiting for many weeks even though he had applied for the passport to be delivered on an urgent basis. “There is no way that you can get an MRP on an urgent basis. Only hand-written passports can be availed in short time.”
He pointed out that handwritten passports cannot guarantee him a hassle-free passage or stay in foreign lands due to the fact that many countries have stopped accepting them due to the lack of readability and authenticity, which is why he chose to try his luck with the MRP.
“What MRPs did was to make travel easier for us, Bangladeshi citizens, abroad. People with handwritten passports often have to spend unnecessary time at airports, which the MRP-holders don’t have to,” he said.
When contacted, officials at the Bangladesh Embassy in Oman, in an email reply, said they are aware of the problems and have taken necessary steps in this regard. “We have requested the concerned authorities to provide four additional machines as well as expert manpower to operate them.”
