Blame the bureaucracy, not technology, for your passport travails.

Bengal’s lone e-enabled Passport Seva Kendra on the Bypass has inherited the red tape of 4 Brabourne Road, turning an online processing system that was supposed to be seamless into one littered with familiar roadblocks.

Metro, which had highlighted on Tuesday how difficult it is to get an e-appointment with a passport official and dodge the touts still on the prowl, brings under the scanner problems that have more to do with mismanagement and manpower shortage than flaws in technology.

Try again tomorrow at 4pm

If you have seen this message flash on your computer screen every time you have gone online to get an appointment with a passport official at the Bypass facility, you haven’t done anything wrong. Neither has technology failed you.

The reason e-appointments have become a lottery is because there are only 850 slots on a given day, which isn’t even one per cent of the number of people logging in across Calcutta at the stroke of 4pm.

Slashing the limit of applications per day by half — 1,700 used to be deposited in a day at the Regional Passport Office on Brabourne Road — is the reason why there is a huge backlog that continues to grow with each passing day.

The argument for reducing the number of applications received at the Passport Seva Kendra is that the new facility is equipped to handle only that many per day. “The slots have been fixed based on the number of gazetted officers available to process passports,” a source said.

The Passport Seva Kendra presently has seven sanctioning officers, but there is room for three more. “One officer cannot process more than 120 applications a day. That is why the maximum number of applications accepted per day has been fixed at 850,” the source said.

Senior officials in the ministry of external affairs confirmed the shortage of officers. “We are trying to bring in more officers on central deputation. For the time being, the regional passport officer has started accepting applications at his office from people who have tried but failed to get online appointments,” Golok Kumar Simli, principal consultant and head of technology for the passport seva project, told Metro.

Regional passport officer R. Sivakumar said: “I am clearing at least 30 such applications a day. Any applicant who has failed to get an online appointment can approach me.”

To be eligible for special approval, an applicant needs to write a letter mentioning the reason why he or she needs a passport quickly and furnish the application reference number that is generated while attempting to seek an online appointment.

Many of those who are unaware of this pay touts and travel agents to get an e-appointment, and not always with success.

You need to type lightning fast

Try asking someone at the Passport Seva Kendra why you aren’t being able to get an e-appointment despite repeated tries and the answer will most likely be “typing speed”. Yes, you are not eligible for a passport because you haven’t been practising your pangrams!

“In the new system, an applicant has to log onto www.passportindia.gov.in, get registered and select preferences of time, date, location, availability of the chosen slot etc before an appointment is booked. Generally, by the time one finishes filling up the online form, all the slots are booked,” said a senior official posted at the Passport Seva Kendra.

Is that all there is to it? Not quite.

Many first-time triers don’t know — and there isn’t any information regarding this in the FAQs on the portal — that the time to log in to book an e-appointment is 4pm. Those who do can’t figure out why they are unable to get an appointment even if they finish filling in all the information in one minute flat.

“I was unaware that bookings open at 4pm. After coming to know about it, I have been trying for four weeks to get an appointment. One day, all appointments were taken by 4:00:20pm. I couldn’t believe anyone could be that fast as the site is incredibly slow at 4pm,” reader Alok Mishra wrote to Metro on Tuesday.

Technology will speed up police verification

That’s what the officials said when the Passport Seva Kendra opened last December, but it wasn’t until a month later that the required server-to-server connection was in place for secure transfer of verification forms.

“We had all the infrastructure ready — computers, printers, electricity and space. Getting the WAN (wide area network) connection wasn’t our responsibility,” said a senior officer of the security control office under Lalbazar.

Sources in the passport office blamed a delay in getting permission from the state government to set up such a network. “We needed the home department’s sanction. They delayed it,” an official said.

But an official in the ministry of external affairs said sanction for such a network was a “matter of a few hours”, not a month. “There must have been some technical error, maybe even a bureaucratic delay in approaching the state government,” he said.

Passports will go directly to the printing queue

In other words, time won’t be wasted once police verification of an applicant’s credentials is complete. The verified form needs to be uploaded at the security control office and directly sent online to the passport-printing queue at the Regional Passport Office.

In Calcutta, passport officials couldn’t follow this system until the second week of last month because the ministry of external affairs delayed sending a small piece of hardware needed for digital signatures.

“Verified forms could not be sent to the printing queue because we didn’t have the dongles needed for digital signature. It took two reminders from the Brabourne Road office and more than 30 days for Delhi to provide these. Till then, verified forms were being couriered to the Regional Passport Office for printing clearance,” an official said.

The security control office had asked for around four dongles for the officers responsible for checking the verified police forms before sending them to the printing queue.

In the districts, the process is still being conducted manually.

“Time was lost in arranging for the basic set-up needed to transfer forms online. Now that the infrastructure is ready, the IB has sought permission from the state administration to use the secure-transfer technology. The green signal hasn’t come yet,” an intelligence branch officer said.

Sources in the home department said the project had been delayed because director-general of police Naparajit Mukherjee had forwarded the file to a senior bureaucrat’s office for ratification. The file is gathering dust there.

How has your experience been if you have applied for a passport online? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com