National Information Centre: Exemplary Use of Technology

The Passport Control & Issuance System – an indigenous, robust and low-cost application – is developed and implemented by National Informatics Centre. It connects, all the 30 passport offices across the country that have been computerised. This includes all the operations from online application to acceptance of the application to the production of machine-readable passports. Decentralisation of acceptance of passport applications is being introduced at over 500 offices across the country to take the passport services at a citizen’s doorstep. In a recent pendency clearance drive at RPO Delhi, it was demonstrated that about 60 officials could produce over 35,000 passports in a span of 10 days by using the existing IT infrastructure. The passport application has even connected all the foreign missions and the data resides in a central database hosted locally. Overseas requests like renewal, lost passports or even visa applications are routinely monitored and disposed off on daily basis.