Two passports to same person set off security alarm

Krishnendu Bandyopadhyay, TNN

KOLKATA: The bizarre coexistence of two passport systems in the city has delivered exactly what security agencies feared most - multiple passports to the same person.

Manoj Ginodia, an employee at a trading firm in Burrabazar and a passport-holder for the last 25 years, now holds another passport that bears his name and date of birth - April 28, 1964 - but carries the photograph of a little boy. The detection of a multiple passport-holder comes just four days after a report in Times City on April 26 highlighted how two passport processing systems in the city that do not share data with each other were proving a nightmare for security agencies.

Ginodia received his second passport this March. Though personal details like name, place of birth and date of birth are same on both documents, Ginodia's original passport bears his signature while the one with the little boy's photograph has a thumb impression. The original passport was issued on May 4, 2011 and the other on February 2, 2012."I applied for a renewal and received the fresh passport in June 2011. But I never applied for this second passport. All details on both passports are correct, except the photographs," Ginodia said on Monday. Aware that the duplicate passport was a security threat both for the country and himself, he decided to report the matter to the authorities. But even as a senior official at the Regional Passport Office (RPO) said a thorough probe would be conducted, security agencies did not rule out the existence of many such multiple passport-holders and the possibility of the documents being misused.

Relieved that his trauma was finally over, Ginodai said, "I would have landed in jail by this time had my passport reached some criminal's hand."

The two parallel passport processing systems came into existence because the Passport Seva Kendra (PSK) was unable to serve a large number of applicants and the Central Passport Organization (CPO) had to open extra counters. These counters used the NIC software of the CPO, though the new passport kendra is run by TCS. A senior CPO official said there was no data-sharing between the two systems. Police and passport officials said lack of data-sharing was just one security lapse and urged an overhaul of the system used by the PSK, citing security loopholes.

Ginodia says he got his passport done through a travel agent. When he applied last year, the PSK was yet to be started. "I contacted a Bentinck Street travel agent to get my passport as I needed to travel to Bangkok urgently. I received my passport in June, within 40 days of applying," he said.

A senior RPO official said, "This should not have happened at all. We will investigate it." Under the new system, printing of passports is automatic - once the police update the status of verification reports as "clear", the passport is allotted and printed by the system. "Passport-signing authorities are not provided with the relevant files," said an official.

I had earlier mentioned the problems I had to face for getting passports for my family. It seems things have improved very much since then. People have started receiving two passports instead of one. Another marketing stunt - i for i Free