Indians May Get E-Passports By 2021 After Successful Completion Of 20K Trials

An e-passport with an in-built chip to store data of your trips, enable quicker immigration, and ensure safety from any kind of forgery, to be a reality in India by 2021. By Tanvi Jain

 

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Attention travellers! Coming 2021, forget your traditional passports, as now you may just get an e-passport with an embedded electronic microprocessor chip. The process for the same has already been initiated by the government, who is also on a lookout for an agency to set up the required infrastructure for the same. This new e-passport will not only make forging difficult but will also speed up the immigration process. 

So far, the government has reportedly issued 20,000 e-passports to diplomats and officials, for trial, and is in the process of expanding it for civilians as well, with the help of an agency that would be able to issue at least 10,000 to 20,000 e-passports an hour, and up to one lakh a day. The National Informatics Centre has already issued a request for proposal to select such an agency and is working with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in this regard. 

 

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Once the e-passport system is included in the current passport system, it will be issued in all passport offices across India, on International Civil Aviation Standards Organisation (ICAO) standard basis, to make sure it’s operational between countries. 

This new e-passport is likely to have a small silicon chip at the back cover, which will probably be capable of storing data on up to 30 international trips, with the help of its 64 kilobytes of memory space.  

 

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“Initiatives such as mPassport Police and mPassport Seva Apps had led to improvements in systems and customer satisfaction. The production of e-Passports would be another important step in this regard,” MEA had quoted External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar as saying on the occasion of Passport Seva Divas on June 24. 

As of 2020, Indian passport holders can easily travel to as many as 58 countries without any visa, as the country stands at 85th position on the Henley & Partners Passport Index.

Related: Fully Biometric Identity System at Indian Airports to Make Air Travel Faster and More Secure

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