The move is significant for around 85,000 Pakistanis in Doha, who earlier had to go to Pakistan to upgrade their passports to machine-readable from the manual, handwritten ones, as countries around the world started enforcing the MRP as a mandatory travel document.
The UAE for instance, announced in summer that all Pakistanis travelling to the Emirate should have the MRP.
In an MRP the data on the identity page is encoded in optical-character-recognition format.
“Pakistan started issuing MRPs in October of 2004 and since then have issued 10mn passports. MRP offices have been increased to 55 across the country from 30 in 2008,” Pakistani Ministry of Interior’s passport and immigration director general Syed Wajid Bukhari said at an introduction session to the community on Thursday.
“Doha becomes the 13th foreign mission after Paris. Our goal is to ultimately extend this service to all overseas missions,” Bukhari said.
In the region, according to the bureaucrat, there are already two MRP offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and two in Saudi Arabia.
“Oman will be next while approvals have already been received for the system each in Kuwait and Bahrain,” Bukhari pointed out.
“Customer feedback is very important and we have instituted a toll-free number for the head office in Islamabad,” he added.
The Pakistan embassy in Qatar said it has already started welcoming citizens wanting to upgrade to the MRP from 8am to 11.30am every weekday, where they are being served in the batches of 15.
“This embassy was built in 1988 when MRPs didn’t exist. We urge citizens to display patience and bear in mind that the service will be extended on first-come basis,” Pakistan embassy charge de’ affaires Zahid Nasrullah said.
The citizen needs to bring in the old passport along with the national ID card, where biometrics and fingerprints will be taken and information forwarded to the Pakistani Ministry of Interior for processing, which is processing 12,000 to 15,000 passports a day on average.
The fee for an MRP with 36 pages is QR115 and QR220 (urgent delivery), the official said.
Other options include a 72-page and 100-page normal and fast-track MRPs at QR245 and QR430 and QR270 and QR540 respectively.
“Those with manual passports can upgrade to MRP without waiting for the validity to end. Each MRP carries a validity of five years,” Bukhari said, while maintaining that the call for 10-year passports is under study.
“A committee is also currently studying the introduction of e-passports for Pakistanis,” he added.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Sarmad Qazi
Quelle/Source: Gulf Times, 27.11.2010
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