he deadline set by International Civil Aviation Organisation requires Nepal to introduce machine readable passports beginning April 1, or else Nepalis carrying existing passports will have to face hassles at airports around the world.
However, authorities are doing precious little to meet the deadline. Till now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the line ministry, lacks sufficient manpower and infrastructure to meet the deadline. MoFA spokesperson Durga Bhattarai, however, claimed that efforts were being made to meet MRP deadline. He said they would recruit necessary manpower to finish the task on time. However, the ministry has not announced any vacancy in this regard. Ministry of General Administration and Public Service Commission is yet to give its nod to recruit manpower.
Bhattarai admitted that they were yet to distribute MRP forms across the nation. He said, “Manpower at zonal and districts levels was not enough to launch MRP in April. We may have to centralise the process of distributing MRP. “
Though Bhattarai claimed that they would be able to introduce machine-readable passports at the central level, it will be no cakewalk for MoFA to accomplish the task. MoFA had been facing manpower crunch for a few months and has paid little attention to add to its manpower. Since bringing out MRP is a costly affair, MoFA may also fall short of seems.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs is still at the stage of floating tenders on MRP. MoFA officials claimed that it was difficult to launch the machine readable passports on time. Ministry of Tourism had alerted the MoFA on the issue but it did not pay sufficient attention to do the needful.
ICAO has been pressing its member countries to launch the machine-readable passports.
However, the officials at Ministry of Foreign Affairs say they would urge ICAO to accept the existing passports. machine-readable passports is aimed to check issuance of fake and illegal passports.
