(a) the total number of Passport Offices in the country at present, location-wise;
(b) whether the Government propose to link all the passport offices of the country through satellite so that one may not be able to get two passports from two different cities; and
(c) if so, the time by which it is likely to be done ?
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR EXTERNAL AFFAIRS (SHRI AJIT KUMAR PANJA)
a) There are 28 Passport Offices in the country at present which are located at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bareilly, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Calcutta, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin, Delhi, Ghaziabad, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Jammu, Jalandhar, Kozhikode, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, Panaji, Patna, Pune, Srinagar, Thane, Trichy, Trivandrum and Visakhapatnam.
b) We are in the process of capturing data in all the passport offices on C-D ROMs to build a central data base. Once this is done, networking of the Passport Offices would be taken up and chances of people getting two passports from two different cities would be minimized to a large extent.
c) The project of connectivity among the Passport Offices is still in the planning stage and is likely to take 2-3 years.