Agartala: Officials of Ministry of External Affairs on Monday confirmed that passport office in Agartala is likely to operationalise by early next year.
“Towards the end of this month or in the early week of January itself so is going to be operationalise very soon,” said A K Sobti, Director, Passport Seva Project (PSP).
The PSP will be a great benefit for those from the state wishing to get a passport and for which they had to wait for several months as passports were being issued from Kolkata.
Moreover, recently hundreds of handwritten passports became invalid after internationally from November 24 last they were not being accepted anymore and were to be replaced by machine readable zone passport.
“Handwritten passport has been banned as per the requirement of the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). Now they will not be accepting internationally manual passport anywhere across the world. So it is in the interest of the applicant or the citizens that they should go for MRZ (machine readable zone) passports so that they are not put to any harassment.” Sobti added.
Sobti along with V K Jain, another official of the MEA, arrived here today to review the work of the mini Passport Seva Kendra prior its inauguration.
The mini Passport Seva Kendra is being set up in Agartala to facilitate delivery of passports.
The Tripura government has written a letter requesting the Centre to set up a Passport office in Agartala.
In the entire northeastern region, there is only one passport office in Guwahati and one Passport Seva Kendra in Manipur. The Kolkata Regional Passport office controls the Tripura Passport Seva.
(With ANI inputs)