Bangalore Passport Office Give TAs A Run For Applications

Vyas Sivanand - Bangalore

Travel agents in Bangalore are in for a tough time with the passport office in the city accepting only three applications per agency a day compared to the earlier figure of five. This came as a shocker to the travel trade in the city as they were already living with a bottleneck of just five applications while they have much more to apply for. According to Niranjan Gupta, treasurer, TAAI, Karnataka chapter, “Travel business especially from the corporate sector is growing in the city. In such a scenario, if we are permitted to submit only three applications, it becomes a very pathetic situation. We have clients who have more than 10,000 applications to be forwarded and in the present case, I am sure we will have to ask them to wait for a few years.”

The reason for such a decision is being attributed to inefficiency of the passport office to handle large number of applications. “The passport officer-in-charge has frozen application acceptance due to capacity constraints. A large number of people come in for submitting their applications and the office is not able to cater to all their needs in the stipulated working hours and the office does not believe in working a minute beyond their schedule,” adds Gupta.

“The passport office’s view is that there are too many agents who come with applications. There are many new agents who have come up and this has created lot of pressure on the passport office. The reason why I became a TAAI member was so that I could get an identity card for entry into the passport office. But when I approached the office with my TAAI membership, even then I was not given an I-card. They say there are about 10 cases pending from travel agents and no fresh I-card is being issued,” says Gayatri B N of M M Sons Travel Pvt Ltd. The passport officer’s post is also a revolving door, with no officer being able to stick to the chair for long. Even the present officer has been transferred. Says Gayatri, “Fifty per cent of the work towards processing of the passport is done by us. The passport office has to do just the rest, but even then they keep complaining that they are under-staffed. The officer’s post is always changing with no single officer being able to remain on the chair for long. The whole thing is in a mess.”

The passport office’s claims that the reason for the shortage of applications can be attributed to a shortage of staff. Says Ranjan Abraham of Clipper Travels, “Cases at the passport office are piling up each day. Each travel agent has about 10-20 cases every day and because of this issue, we have to cut a sorry figure in front of our clients. Our clients come to us to avoid all kind of bureaucracy and other hassles and we are not able to help them. The passport office claims that it is

terribly under-staffed, but then if there are so many applications, then

they should be well prepared. Just reducing the number of application acceptances is not the way out. Why are other states not having such a problem?” Grievances galore, it is not just the travel fraternity which is getting affected. Outbound tourism per se originating from the state will indicate pitiable figures.