Bengal accounts for almost half the passport applications pending police verification in the country, prompting the external affairs ministry to write to the state government to fast-track a process that frustrates many in Calcutta every day.

According to the ministry’s letter to chief secretary Samar Ghosh, 34,131 passport applications were pending police verification in the state till end-2010, a staggering statistic compared with 40,188 for the rest of India.

“The numbers aren’t a surprise. Anyone who has been to the passport office in the city knows what it takes to get a passport,” admitted an official.

In Delhi, a passport takes three weeks to be processed and delivered. The same process could take between two and six months in Calcutta, and not always because documents aren’t in order.

“Unless you are applying for a tatkal passport, be prepared for the long haul,” warns a south Calcuttan who got her passport five months after filing her application.

The biggest chunk of the verification backlog is in the two 24-Parganas, Howrah and Hooghly. In the city proper, where the police are already sitting on a mountain of applications, over 100 new ones are filed every day.

An official of the regional passport office said processing a passport application, including police verification, should take no longer than four weeks.

So why have the city passport office and the police failed to achieve a target that almost every other state has?

Officials at the city office, which caters to 19 districts of Bengal, five districts of Tripura and four districts of Sikkim, blamed the flood of applications for the delays. The police passed the buck to the applicants, claiming that wrong information provided by them was responsible for reports getting delayed.

Most applicants have a different story to tell. A young man who lives on the northern fringes of the city voluntarily turned up at the local police station for verification after tracking his application online for a few weeks, only to be asked to come “some other day”. By the time his personal details were verified, another four months had passed.

The normal procedure is for the regional passport office to forward an application to either the security control office or the district Intelligence Branch, which, after a physical verification of the applicant, is supposed to alert three offices — the local police station, the Special Branch and the criminal records section in Lalbazar or the district police.

The security control office’s brief is to send reports from the three departments to the passport office.

Rarely does an applicant escape paying a bribe to the police even if his or her documents are in order. But a bribe doesn’t guarantee that the police verification report will reach the passport office quickly. “I paid Rs 200 but it wasn’t until two months later that I got my passport,” said a retired college teacher.

Those who refuse to pay up are harassed. “When the police officer checking my papers could not find a single mistake, he said I needed to submit a fresh photocopy of my birth certificate after getting it re-attested. I was forced to bribe him,” said Shantanu Sinha of Girish Park.

The postal employee who delivers the passport also invariably demands his share of the bribe booty. Some are careless, as Behala resident Malay Roy found out.

“My passport was delivered to a temporary guard in my apartment block. It could have been misplaced or misused,” he said. The spate of complaints received by the consumer affairs department reflects only half of what applicants have to undergo to get a passport.

Regional passport officer R. Shivkumar was unavailable for comment. Shakeel Ahmed, the deputy commissioner of the security control office, insisted his office was “very fast” and usually completed the process “in 10-12 days”.

Delhi is set to implement a pilot project in Bengal by August to issue passports within three days of verification, but officials fear the police will play spoilsport. “It was successful in Karnataka, Chandigarh and Ludhiana but we are doubtful about Bengal,” said an official in South Block.

— With inputs from Imran Ahmed Siddiqui

74,319
Passport applications pending police verification countrywide
34,131
Passport applications pending police verification in Bengal

Time taken in Delhi to process passport: Three weeks
Time taken in Bengal: Two to six months
Coming soon: Pilot project to issue passports within three days of verification report