Not fast, nor hassle-free: The online passport debacle

Sufiya Begum, 74, from Brahmanbaria's Banchharampur Sayfullah Kandi area, is seen trudging down from the fourth floor of the Department of Immigration and Passport headquarters, with her granddaughter and son in tow.

Wearing exhaustion on her face, Sufiya now seems almost defeated. She has been pursuing every possible avenue for the past one year all in the hopes of getting her son Habibur Rahman, 23, a passport renewal, along with a change of his birth date.

Habib is currently residing in Rome, Italy. He applied to get his passport renewed on 5 October 2020 and the tentative collection date was set at 9 November, 2020. The date came and passed amid the pandemic and his passport situation has been in a limbo since.

"We have been coming to the passport office every day. They informed us that my son would not get the desired passport as he applied to change his birth date…," she said with a sigh.

"The authorities said they cannot change anyone's birth date after more than five years and my son's passport was made around 13 years ago. However, a recruiting agency changed my son's birth date in 2008 when he first went to Italy. Now we want the legal date. If his passport is not renewed, he would be declared an illegal immigrant," she said.

Sufiya and her son Habib aren't alone in the struggle. Harassment of thousands of migrants over their passport issues doesn't reflect the importance of their contribution.

According to the Brac Migration Programme, there are about one crore expatriate workers from Bangladesh working in different parts of the world. They send about $24-25 billion in remittance to the country every year.

Shariful Islam Hasan, head of the Brac Migration Programme, said, "Even in the 50 years of the country's independence, the authorities are not able to provide any kind of hassle-free services to expatriate workers. The passport is just a travel document of a person, but the service has never been bribe-free or smooth.

"If a person has a National Identity card, why do they have to wander from door to door to get a passport? We have been seeking for decades to make the passport service hassle free for expatriates; you praise them for sending hundreds of crores in remittance, but you have not been able to make a smooth passport system in years!" 

The intimidating passport office: A personal experience

Sariful added that not just in Bangladesh, these migrant workers are also being harassed at different foreign missions.

To mitigate this problem, the government in 2019 had announced the launch of the online passport system. From the comfort of their homes, one could avail the services of the passport officers.

The process, launched amid much fanfare as another shining jewel on the crown of Bangladesh's digitalisation, was meant to greatly quicken the process of getting passports.

Amid a serious manpower shortage and a lack of infrastructural capacity, however, the digitalised passport operations, too, have become more of a headache than a boon for citizens.

A top director of a conglomerate first attempted to get his e-passport on 8 December 2021 and found all the slots had been filled till 4 January 2022. His passport application, consisting of 48 pages for 10 years' validity, was under the "Super Express Delivery" category, which promised delivery within two days.

He, however, could not even secure a date in the next month to just take photographs and give his fingerprints.

"On the Department of Immigration and Passport office premises, an agent [dalal] offered to get the job done in just five working days in exchange for Tk5,000 more. And magically I got the e-passport on 14 December!" the company director told The Business Standard.

"I could not get a date for my fingerprint or iris scan and photo. I don't know how the agent got the date. If there is a backdoor, then what will happen to the common man," he said.

Travel-based content creator Md Ashraful Alam, narrating his experience to TBS, said, "My passport was about to expire in October and I filled all the required information on the government website and tried more than 20 times in two weeks to just get a date to take the photo but unfortunately, I couldn't find any available date neither in the regular nor in the express delivery quota.

"All the slots in the next three months were filled up. At first, I saw an available date in the express category, but no date in the regular one. I thought it was a mistake and switched my application to express, but then it showed that all the express dates were also filled."

Ashraf pointed out another hassle: one has to fill in the passport form every week as the system does not save one's data for more than a week. "The experience is horrible," he said.

 Demand rises, capacity remains unchanged

The government attempted a mega transformation in passport operations by introducing the online application system and e-passport.

It was to be the new era of hassle-free and speedy service, where one could submit the hard copy of an online application form, providing biometric data, and other documents.

While taking online appointments, only a certain number of applicants would be allowed to submit applications within a specific period of time in an effort to contain excessive crowds on the office premises.

The new era, however, has only been on paper.

With faith in the online system yet to be instilled, the passport office in Agargaon still sees around 10,000 applicants a day, while it has a capacity of only 1,000.

The huge crowd results in long queues, with even the waiting time to get on the elevator reaching 20 minutes.

Something has clearly gone wrong and fingers point towards bureaucratic red tape.

The passport office sought to recruit 6,087 personnel in the year 2017, when daily passport delivery was 10,000 to 15,000.

The proposed manpower requirement was revised down to 4,137 in the year 2018, before being cut again to 917 in the year 2021. The number was finally chopped to 347 recently by abolishing 147 posts existing, which meant the fresh recruitment would be of only 199.

The recruitment proposal is yet to get final approval.

Meanwhile, in the past five years, passport demand more than doubled, with the passport office, according to its data, delivering more than 35,000 passports a day.

But, its manpower requirement is yet to be met. To cope with the growing number of applicants, the office required 2,953 new recruits in 2018, according to Nazrul Islam Bhuiya, system analyst (director) at the Department of Immigration and Passport.

Currently, there are 1,184 posts in four categories, including some foreign missions. Of those, 84 posts remain vacant, in addition to the new manpower already demanded.

Major General Mohammad Ayub Chowdhury, director general of the department, told TBS that worker shortage was a big problem at a time when the technology had transformed but manpower was not increased adequately to cope with the change.

He said digitalisation of applications had reduced the hassles of documentation, but service-seekers faced difficulties in getting slots online due to some "loopholes in the server", which they were trying to fix.

He said the passport office had introduced online slots for only three stations – Agargaon, Uttara and Keraniganj. Ayub also said the passport office was receiving at least 5,000 more applications daily compared to the pre-pandemic time, chalking it down to the suspension of its operations during the pandemic.

The resumption of services led to the flood of applications, which, coupled with the low capacity of the passport office, was creating hassles for service-seekers, he said.

Meanwhile, the department's officials told TBS that more than 30,000 e-passport applications have been halted for various reasons, including name correction such as from Md to Mohammad and birth date change.

"We have to ensure the global standard of immigration, which is why the public has to suffer for their name and date of birth to be changed," DG Major General Ayub said.

Another official, requesting anonymity, said, "How can you permit someone without verification when around 55 people in the last three months submitted fake affidavits for 60 applications?"

 The middle gaming the top

A couple and their children came to the passport office in the second week of December to collect their new passports – for the third time. They were sent back empty-handed.

"We have been denied repeatedly and they said there is no slot. However, we will not pay a single penny illegally. Whatever happens, we will do it in a legal way, we have no hurry," the couple told TBS, wishing not to be named.

The illegal way, in this case, is taking help from the numerous brokers milling around the passport office premises.

Exploiting the supposed flaws in the online server, brokers manipulate the online slots for physical appointment, leaving most citizens staring at an already filled up schedule.

For a few extra thousands, brokers manage to get the job done faster than what the online service promises.

This correspondent found some middlemen offering people passports for the extra cost.

Alamgir Hossain, one such broker, came to Dhaka to get his own passport. After failing, he instead decided to choose a new career path for himself: that of a broker.

Now he styles himself as someone who fulfils people's dreams to get passports.

"I could not get my own passport, but learnt the process here, including the backdoors. I no longer dream of going abroad, but rather want to help others achieve their dreams," he added.

Our Brahmanbaria, Moulvibazar and Lakshmipur correspondents also said service-seekers in the regional passport offices had claimed that they were denied passports in real time, but were offered the "super express service" by middlemen.

To regulate this, the Department of Immigration and Passport recently undertook an initiative to legalise the middlemen (agents) and get them registered into an accountable process. In this way, the service-seeker would have to pay a fixed amount to get a hassle-free passport.

Asked about how brokers were securing online slots before service seekers could do so, Shihab Uddin Khan, director (Admin & Finance) at the passport office, did not answer.

He, however, said, "The department has already sent a letter to the home ministry, proposing appointment of brokers as agents. The home ministry says they are now focusing on making regulations to monitor the activities of the agents."