Machine-readable passports likely in a year
Tender process begins this month
Courtesy New Age 10/9/08 Mustafizur Rahman
The much-talked-about project on machine-readable passports and visas is set to enter into the tender process this month with immigration officials hoping to start issuing digitised travel documents by the middle of next year.
The Department of Immigration and Passports is expected to float within a week open international tender for appointing consultants to monitor, evaluate and supervise the printing of machine-readable passports.
‘We have already received allocation for appointing consultants…We will open an international tender within a week after getting approval from the home affairs ministry,’ director general of the department Abdur Rob Hawlader told New Age on Tuesday.
The tender process for implementing the Tk 560-crore project is at the final stage and project detail is ready to be sent to the Planning Commission soon for approval, he said.
‘All preparations have been made to introduce machine-readable passports…Officials concerned are working hard so that such passports and visas can be issued from July 2009.’
International Organisation for Migration will oversee the implementation of the five-year project to be funded by the government. The allocation for the implementation has already been made in the current budget.
The passports will be simple machine-readable, without any memory chip as planned earlier, officials said.
‘Memory chips will have only one-year guarantee while passports will be issued for 10 years. It will be tough to maintain the chips and so we have decided to ensure the minimum criteria for the passports,’ said a technical expert for the project.
People would be able to apply online which would reduce mistakes in spelling of names and other things, the expert said, adding that online applicants would have to come to passport offices just for photographs and finger prints.
There will be offices in all 64 districts of the country to deliver the passports, said official sources.
The government had earlier planned to introduce machine-readable passports and visas from July 2009 and four consultants from the IOM have been working voluntarily for developing expertise on the system.
Immigration officials said terms and conditions for the tender had been finalised, and hoped that the project evaluation committee of the Planning Commission would give a final go.
Winner of the bid will have to ensure printing 20,000 passports every month with their own logistics, and develop local expertise during the project period, the officials added.
The BNP-Jamaat government had ventured on a huge project with an estimated cost of Tk 1,546 crore to introduce machine-readable passports, visas and national identity cards. The project was to be implemented by the home ministry, but it was abandoned in late 2006 following controversies over appointment of consultant and tender evaluation.
The controversies centred around the ministry’s appointment of a consultant with a monthly salary of Tk 3.9 lakh even after the selection committee deemed him ‘unfit’ for the job, said sources in the home affairs ministry.
A six-member technical committee, headed by the director general of the immigration department, is now working for the project taken afresh by the interim government.
In a machine-readable passport, the data on the identity page are encoded in the ‘optical character recognition’ format. Most passports in the world can now be read by machines.
Bangladesh, being a signatory to the International Civil Aviation Organisation — specialised UN agency that regulates international air travel — , must introduce the digital system by April 1, 2010, and convert all manually-issued passports into the machine-readable ones by November 25, 2015.
Some 115 out of 187 member nations, including
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