Thanks Madam Sushma!
In India, to get a passport has not been so easy some time back and in Jammu Kashmir it was just a nightmare for the applicants. A couple of years back when the online process was missing in Jammu and Kashmir, it was so difficult to get a passport for an applicant that thousands of applications got stuck in the Passport offices at Srinagar and Jammu and many lost in transit between Passport office and ADG (CID) office that shifted every six months between Srinagar and Jammu with Darbar Move. Further, CID sleuth remained the key person to decide for one's Passport as Passport Officer has to act on two-line CID report only just as a rubber stamp. This state has yet to come out of security hang-over and arbitrariness of CID/Police cop who would clear or mar the chance of one getting a passport. However, the recent streamlining by removing too much rigid formalities in application for issuance of Passport will be of great relief to the people particularly in the rest of the country.
Union External Affairs Minister Smt. Sushma Swaraj deserves all appreciations for the humane manner in which she has been handling her responsibilities. It is, therefore, no surprise that she has sought to streamline, liberalise and ease the process of issue of passports in a manner which has become her trademark. She has, on the basis of a committee's recommendations, looked into the difficulties that relatively small sections of applicants face in doing the paperwork for their applications, facilitating the process and procedures for them.
One reform is that the online passport application form will now require the applicant to provide the name of father or mother or legal guardian, only one parent and not both. This would enable single parents to apply for passports for their children. The total number of annexures has been reduced from 15 to nine. All the annexures that are required to be given by the applicants would be in the form of a self-declaration on a plain paper. No attestation / swearing by / before any notary / Executive Magistrate / First Class Judicial Magistrate would be henceforth necessary. These are welcome changes in a system where there was an awful lot of avoidable red-tape. Married applicants would no longer be required to provide any marriage certificate.
The passport application form will, henceforth, not require the applicant to provide the name of her / his spouse in case of separated or divorced persons. Such applicants for passports would not be required to provide even the divorce decree. Orphaned children who do not have any proof of date of birth such as birth certificate or the matriculation certificate or the declaratory court order, may now submit a declaration given by the head of the orphanage / child care home on the official letter head of the organisation confirming the DoB of the applicant. Sadhus and sanyasis can now mention names of their spiritual gurus instead of biological parents under new passport rules.
This would go down well with this class of people who face issues of not keeping up with the material world. All in all, the liberalisation may appear trivial but there is attention to detail of the type that is not the hallmark of government requirements.
