Passport office has new building at Koramangala
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: After a spate of new rules, the Passport Office is all set to experience another change.

This time, it is the office itself, which is moving to a new building in Koramangala, next to Commercial Tax Office, near National Games Village. The 20,000 sq-foot building is all set to be inaugurated in the last week of February.

The new office is spread over four floors and all submissions including Tatkal, re-issual and fresh applications from out of city can be submitted on the ground floor under a single queue system and the first floor will deal with enquiries in the morning along with Tatkal processing.

Fresh applicants from Bangalore can continue to submit applications at Bangalore One and Speed Post centres to reduce the long queues outside the office.

The new place will have more processing counters and this is expected to cut down on the waiting time. In the present office, the queue spills out on to the road. A big parking lot at the new place will solve a major problem.

“The new building has been planned carefully and the layout and the counters have been designed to optimise space allocation and process more applications to reduce the waiting time. We have a shortage of staff at present, but expect to have 20 more people on the rolls by April. That should help us process applications faster. We have also created a separate policy section that will handle complicated cases,” says Regional Passport Officer P Kumaran. Security is very high on the new premises, which has 32 close circuit cameras and huge posse of guards including a woman constable. The office is also planning to restrict public access to office areas by using access card system for employees.

Meanwhile, applications will now be tagged with a bar code along with the file number for tracking to reduce the number of mistakes in the applications. The internal database has also been upgraded to Windows platform and it makes it easier to connect to peripheral devices like bar code readers and fingerprint readers.