HYDERABAD: For the 1.5 lakh Hyderabadis who apply for a passport annually, tackling babus and agents at the Regional Passport Office (RPO), is only half the battle. The other half unfolds at a local police station where an applicant's documents land for the final verdict __ the police verification. And if standing for long hours in serpentine queues at the RPO is not bad enough, applicants say that the wait for police verification is even more frustrating. In fact, according to popular public perception, 90% of passport delay is because of laxity on the part of the police department.
As per official records, the special branch (Hyderabad) alone receives about 500 passport files everyday. Another 150 odd is added by the Cyberabad police limit. Applications collected at these two special branches is then disbursed to the concerned police `zones'. A work force of roughly 250 `havaldars' is used by the department to dispose these applications that, as per the passport rule book, should be cleared in not more than 21 days.
As an incentive, the RPO even dishes out a cash `prize' of Rs 200 on every police verification that is completed within the given time-frame. Police authorities, however, claim that they do not get a single slice of the pie and that the entire money flows into the state coffers. Passing the buck for the delay in verification on to the passport office, the men in uniform even say that it is the obsolete software of the RPO that is responsible for this tainted reputation of the department.
"Within hours after an applicant submits his documents at the RPO, the status of his file changes to `police verification awaited' on the official website. In reality, however, we never receive a file before a minimum of 15 days," said an inspector at the police verification cell (Hyderabad), adding how this time period stretches up to one-two months in many cases. "Even after we send the cleared applications to the RPO, the status does not change unless the file is finally processed there and the passport is ready to be delivered," the inspector added.
R S Praveen Kumar, joint commissioner of police (special branch) says that department is striving towards rectifying this gap in information and has even started a status update system on the Hyderabad police website. "If an applicant logs on to this site, he will get an accurate picture. The applicant will correctly know if his file has reached the police department or not in the first place. There is also an SMS service that we are promoting for the same," he said.
But the efforts of the police department seem to have done little to change public opinion so far. Apart from the slow pace of disposal of applications, denizens still rue the policemen's demand for cash `rewards' for verifications. No passport file, they say, is cleared without paying a tip to the havaldar visiting their house. And this amount ranges from a meagre Rs 100 to as much as Rs 1,000, depending upon the urgency of the applicant. Once money changes hands, concerns about whether the candidate indeed has a clean image and has been `legally' residing at the premises for at least one year (as is the requirement for getting a passport), are conveniently forgotten. "I am yet to come across a person who managed to get his passport (either through Tatkal or the regular route) without paying a bribe to the local policeman," said Rajesh Dubey a resident of Gachibowli who himself had to shell out Rs 500 to speed up the police verification process for his passport last year.
Officials at the RPO are only too keen to agree with such claims. In fact, in reply to an RTI application filed by a resident recently, the RPO clearly pointed out how police verifications were not being completed on time, leading to a severe loss in revenue for the department.
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