Jalandhar, August 28: If the number of immigrants from Doaba is high, so is the number of people being deported back home. The Regional Passport Officer on Tuesday shared that as many as 28-30 deportation cases were being processed daily at his office, mostly because of overstay or illegal immigration.
At an outreach programme by the publicity wing of the Ministry of External Affairs, Regional Passport Officer Harmanbir Gill said, “There is so much deportation work in my office, which caters to nine districts of Punjab, that there is a 10-day waiting time to take up cases. I am daily attending to 28-30 deportation cases transferred by our diplomatic missions abroad. Most people being repatriated are those from Canada, the US and the UK.”
He said, “When the deported person appears before us, we assess his guilt on the basis of various reports coming to us via the missions and Intelligence Bureau. The amount of penalty that we impose on him under the Passport Act depends on the number and types of concealments he had made. We also recover the amount that the Indian Government spends on his ticket for bringing him back.”
The RPO said, “These cases are besides those that our system catches on a regular basis when a deported person applies for a fresh passport. Since the entire data of deported persons is fed in our system, they automatically come under our scanner.”
Joint Secretaries Raveen Kumar and Deepak Mittal said, “Since the number of people migrating from Punjab is more, so are the deportation cases. Of the nearly three crore NRIs, 25 lakh to 30 lakh are from Punjab.”
Gill also shared that the Jalandhar passport office made an income of Rs 74.7 crore in 2017 by issuing 4.48 lakh passports, almost five times more than in 2012 when the office fetched an amount of Rs 15.82 crore by issuing 1.32 lakh passports. “Of the total passports being issued, 60 per cent are fresh,” he said.
Ever since the jurisdiction barrier at the time of applying for passport has been removed recently, the Jalandhar RPO, which caters to Jalandhar city, Jalandhar rural, Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur, Nawanshahr, Gurdaspur, Pathankot, Batala and Moga, has of late started receiving applications even from people outside Punjab, including those from Ambala, Kurukshetra and Panipat.
After this change, the one-day waiting time for getting an appointment for passport application has now increased to four days. With the change, the income of the office, too, is set to multiply.
Source Tribune India
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