KATHMANDU, SEP 26 - Stepping up its crackdown on passportdefaulters , the Department of Passport has put details of 84,000 lost passport s—both handwritten and machine readable—on the Interpol website with help from the Nepal Police.
The list includes reports of lost passport s from December 26, 2010 till last month. The details include bearer’s name, passport number, authority that issued it, issue date and the validity period.
Some 500 of the complaints are about lost machine readablepassport s. Nepal started issuing MRPs on December 26, 2010.
A passport that bears the lost number is illegal and its carrier faces consequences. The immigration law requires the seizure of suchpassport s while the bearers are fined or jailed.
The Interpol has a separate wing for Stolen and Lost Travel Documents. The website of the Passport Department updates the list of passport s replaced by the District Administration Offices and Nepali missions abroad on a regular basis. The department also uses its own database for the purpose.
“We will continue to update the lost passport list for Interpol to discourage people from seeking passport s repeatedly”, said Sharad Raj Aryan, director at the Passport Department.
Officials said that during the transition between manual passport and MRPs, several thousand travel documents were issued on the basis of the recipients’ claim of loss. In some cases, an easy access to citizenship has added to the complexity of the matter. Citizenship is the major basis for issuing a passport in Nepal where no police verification of the applicant is necessary.
The department has a dedicated counter on its premises for people to re-apply when their passport s are lost. In case of a lost MRP, one needs to pay Rs 15,000 besides producing other requirements such as police report and a copy of the notice of loss published in a national daily.
No comments:
Post a Comment