By A Staff Reporter,Kathmandu, Dec. 9: Suspended e-passport applications and issuance through the online system have not yet come into operation fully.
As a result, the service seekers who are in urgent need of their passports are found worrying.
“See here, there are no CPUs of these computers, they are taken to clear the virus,” an employee working at the passport section of the District Administration Office, Kathmandu, was seen showing a man who had reached the DAO seeking information about his application for the passport.
Of the four computers used to take photographs and upload the application form at the DAO, Kathmandu, only one was in functioning condition on Friday. And there was only one employee in the entire section.
“Sir, it may take a few more days to fix the computers, and the process of issuing passports will begin, we are helpless now because of the virus,” the employee was heard telling the gentleman. The employee also informed that even not all computers of the Passport Department of Tripureshwor were working.
According to the Department of Passports (DoP), Kathmandu, the online application service will come into full operation by Friday this week (December 13). We will bring our all online services into full operation in the district, area administration offices (DAOs), Area Administration Offices (AAOs), and Nepali Missions abroad,” Rabindra Rajbhandari, Director at the Department of Passports (DoP) told The Rising Nepal, on Sunday.
Still, 30 districts and 12 Nepali Missions abroad have to undergo thorough scanning to identify the problems while complete or partial services in 25 missions and 50 DAOs and AAOs have already begun, said Rajbhandari.
“Since the day of obstruction due to a malware attack in the system, we have completed our screening in more than 225 places including DAOs and AAOs by mobilising our technical teams and with the help of the technical teams from Nepal’s e-passport printing company, IDEMIA, the French company,” said Rajbhandari.
“The screening work is still on, and most probably, we will complete it and resume all online services across the country by December 13,” he added.
There is no place where the service has been completely down, they are either open partially or fully in many offices as of now, added Rajbhandari.
In 2020, IDEMIA won the contract to print two million e-passports for Nepal. Again in July 2023, Nepal negotiated a contract with IDEMIA to purchase an additional 2.8 million biometric passports.
Through a preliminary investigation of the Department, we did not find any serious breach or attack made by any individual or company in the system, this might have happened mainly due to virus spread with the use of personal pen drives and other additional USB ports,” said Rajbhandari.
“Importantly, we don’t have any problem of data loss of the information and details of the citizens and breach in the login passport and username of the respective offices,” claimed Rajbhandari.
He clarified that when the problem was first diagnosed on the night of November 20, we immediately decided to shut down our services across the country for the safety and security of the data and personal records of the citizens and, now, the service was brought into operation partially.
Manual processing and technical analysis are going hand in hand to identify the problem of the respective areas and districts, he said.
At the Passport Department Office, Tripureshwar, there is no such problem, the issuance of the passport is ongoing, he said.
According to the Department, passport services are fully operational at its central office in Tripureshwar, Kathmandu, where emergency requests are being handled without disruption. However, services at several district offices and missions abroad remain on hold.
However, the reality is otherwise. Several service seekers complained that they were not getting their passports for days. Prakash Chand from Rajbiraj, Saptari, is one of them. He came to Kathmandu to collect his e-passports and visited the Tripureshwar office in Kathmandu but was unable to get his passport even after visiting the department for three days. “Now, I am finding it difficult to manage my stay in Kathmandu,” he said.
In a notice last week, the department stated that passports for previously submitted applications, including biometrics, are being processed and dispatched through regular channels. But it apologised for the inconvenience caused by the disruption.
During this period, passports were issued only under expedited services at selected locations, Rajbhandari said.
The Rising Nepal
