The scarcity has affected heaps of Pakistanis, mainly students, who have been planning to tour abroad.
Pakistani residents are going through subject in getting new passports due to a scarcity of lamination paper.
According to Pakistan’s Directorate General of Immigration & Passports (DGI&P), the lamination paper used in the passports is imported from France.
Qadir Yar Tiwana, the Director General for Media of the Ministry of Interior, the mum or dad ministry of DGI&P, informed the newspaper that the authorities was once doing its excellent to navigate the crisis.
“The scenario will quickly be beneath manage and passport issuance will proceed as normal,” Tiwana said. He similarly brought that the branch had already witnessed a regular decline in the backlog.
The scarcity has affected hundreds of Pakistanis who have been planning to journey abroad. Several students, who have looming admission cut-off dates in universities round the world, have blamed the inefficiency of the Pakistan authorities for the crisis.
“I was once all set to pass to Dubai for work soon. My household and I had been past ecstatic that our fortunes would subsequently alternate however the mismanagement of DGI&P looks to have fee me my golden ticket out of poverty and this country,” Gul, a resident of Punjab, informed the newspaper.
Hira, a pupil from Peshawar, stated that her pupil visa to Italy used to be these days authorised and she was once supposed to be a part of in October.
“However, the unavailability of a passport robbed me of an chance to leave,” she said, including that it was once unfair that she used to be paying the fee for a authorities department’s inefficiency.
Muhammad Imran, a resident of Peshawar, stated that he is worn-out of the passport department’s non-stop lengthen and alleged that they have been main candidates on as a substitute of telling them the truth.
“Ever seeing that September the passport workplace has been pointing out that your passport will come subsequent week however a couple of weeks have handed and they maintain repeating the same,” Imran.
Meanwhile, a senior officer of the passport workplace in Peshawar, informed The Express Tribune beneath the situation of anonymity that they ought to solely manner 12 to thirteen passports per day as in contrast to 3,000 to 4,000 passports earlier.
Notably, this is now not the first time that such a disaster has loomed in Pakistan. In 2013, the printing of Pakistani passports got here to a halt due to the DGI&P owing cash to printers and a lack of lamination papers.