India To Roll Out E-passport, Matching 100 Other Countries

India is set to issue passports embedded with chips containing the holder’s biometric data, joining a wave of countries that have already taken the step as it pushes to boost security and smooth international travel for its citizens.

Sanjay Bhattacharya, secretary of the consular, passport and visa division at India’s Ministry of External Affairs, this month tweeted the “next-gen e-passport” will launch “soon,” without giving an exact timeline.

He said the passports will comply with the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization, a specialized United Nations agency.

According to the ICAO, over 100 states and other entities such as the U.N. currently issue e-passports, with more than 490 million such documents in circulation.

Malaysia became the first country to launch an e-passport in 1998, before the ICAO adopted a global blueprint for integrating biometrics into passports and other machine-readable travel documents. Belgium issued the world’s first passport compliant with ICAO standards in 2004, while Bangladesh was the first South Asian nation to introduce e-passports in 2020.

As well as speeding up passage through immigration counters at airports and ports, experts say e-passports cut the risk of duplication and data tampering.

“An electronic chip would be embedded in the [Indian] passport booklet jacket, with personal particulars of the applicants [including biometrics] digitally signed and stored in the chip,” Harshita Bhatnagar, a former national information and communications technology expert with the Asian Development Bank, told Nikkei Asia.

India has already issued about 20,000 e-passports to diplomats and other officials under a pilot project that began in 2008. It is now extending that to other people.

The External Affairs Ministry has a long-term contract with software maker Tata Consultancy Services, which since 2008 has helped the government transform the delivery of passport-related services by digitizing processes.

On Jan. 7, the government said it had signed a new agreement with the company to implement a new phase of the program in which TCS is to help upgrade technology, strengthen data security and take care of other matters.

In a statement, the company said it will “develop innovative new solutions to enable the issuance of e-passports and further enhance the citizen experience using technologies such as biometrics, artificial intelligence, advance data analytics, chatbots, auto-response, natural language processing, and the cloud.”

“Biometric passports can really ease up the long queues at immigration counters,” said Vineeta Dwivedi, head of digital communications at the Mumbai-based S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research.

“But [the] government should ensure data security,” she warned. “Top digital data experts should be consulted to ensure that important personal data does not fall into the wrong hands.”

India issued over 10 million passports a year between 2017 and 2019, dropping to 6.8 million in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

 

SOURCE  :  TIMES KUWAIT

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