Editorial
Missing the ICAO deadline
Machine readable passports must be an urgent priority
Bangladesh will not be able to make the April 1 deadline on machine readable passports. We have been informed that there will be a wait of at least till the end of April before the MRP project gets underway. That is certainly not cheering news, seeing that it threatens to put a very large number of Bangladeshis in a spot where applying for and getting passports is concerned. Effective next month, the passport and immigration department will not accept applications for any new handwritten passports. That is understandable. But what does place people in a difficult situation is that even if they begin applying for MRPs from April 1, there is little guarantee that they will be getting these passports in a reasonable frame of time. We note here, of course, the assurance by the authorities that they expect to begin the process of producing MRPs by the end of April.
The question which now arises has to do particularly with the matter of the L/Cs. The move by the International Civil Aviation Organisation to have its member states move into machine readable passports for their citizens was made quite some years ago, in 2005 to be precise. That in itself should have been a warning for the Bangladesh authorities to speed up the process of the work and by the end of this month everything should have been in place. To be sure, there are other countries as well which have fallen behind in keeping to the ICAO deadline. But that cannot serve as an excuse for our authorities. What must now be done is for the relevant government quarters to go for a swift removal of the all the constraints which have come in the way of a preparation of MRPs. The complications which have arisen over the L/Cs ought to have been removed a long time ago. That they were not is once again a sign of the bureaucratic delays which often hold up essential business relating to the public interest. Officials of the Malaysia-based IRIS Corporation Berhad have made it known that they have been trying to open an L/C here since the Bangladesh government initialled a deal with them on employing their expertise in the preparation of MRPs in mid February. In other words, more than a month has gone by without an L/C being opened.
The paramount requirement at this stage is for all the red tape to be cut out of the L/C process. The red tape factor, we note, involves several ministries. Why that should be so in a case of such vital significance as passports boggles the mind. Besides, once the L/C is opened, IRIS will need time to train the manpower that will be asked to do the job of going into the finer details of producing the MRPs. The sense of urgency is as such huge. And we expect the authorities to go full steam into making sure that our citizens do not run into travel-related difficulties after April 1.
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