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Rekha Dixit
Rekha Dixit

TIE UP

Post offices to serve as passport seva kendra

passport-pti The post office network is spread wide and once passport seva is integrated with it, applicants from remote areas will be benefitted | PTI

You may no longer be going to post offices to purchase inland letters. But the Postal Department is reinventing itself in various ways to keep up with changing times. The latest in a series of moves (starting a money payment bank, managing Kanya Vikas Dhan and NREGA payments)  is a tie-up to ease the pressure of the passport office. Passport applicants will soon be able to go to a post office near them to get their biometrics and other formalities done for their passport. 

Announcing the tie up, Minister of state for External Affairs V.K. Singh said that this initiative was the brainchild of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who was looking at different ways of easing processes for applicants. The pilot project will start at two post offices, one at Mysuru (Karnataka) and the other at Dabhod (Gujarat), though the plan is to extend it to 38 post offices across India by March end. The election code of conduct has prevented the scheme from taking off early, and the government is not even announcing the post offices yet. 

“So far,  we were just delivery agents for passports, now we will play a more active role in issuing them, too,'' said Manoj Sinha, minister of state, Telecom. The post office network is spread wide and once passport seva is integrated with it, applicants from remote areas will be benefitted.

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Topics : #Passport

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