The government has decided to extend the contract of France-based Oberthur Technologies to print machine-readable passports (MRP) for two years. But it has ignored one of the major demands from Nepalis working in the Gulf countries and frequent flyers to increase the number of pages in the passport.

According to the decision, the Oberthur Technologies will print 2.5 million passports at $4.89 a passport against the current rate of $3.59. It will cost an additional Rs 332.82 million to the government.

The Cabinet’s Economic and Infrastructure Committee has decided to extend the bid of the existing printer rather than going for a fresh tender, citing time constraint and other logistical difficulties after the major earthquakes to meet the deadline set by the International Civil Aviation Organization.

Nepal is required to replace all the handwritten passports issued before 2010 December with machine readable ones by November 25. The handwritten passport will become invalid after that date.  

“It will be difficult to replace the hand written passport completely with machine readable ones in the next four months,” said a source at the Foreign Ministry. “It takes two months to call a fresh global tender which will make it almost impossible to meet the deadline.”
From going for a fresh tender to safely transfering passport data to its own system, the entire process will take at least two years, the source said, trying to justify the decision to extend the bid without competition.  

But the government has overlooked the demand of millions of frequently travelling Nepalis, mainly the migrant workers in the Gulf and Malaysia, to increase leaflets of passport from the current 32 pages.

“We had proposed to increase the pages of passport from 32 to 64. But we don’t know why it was rejected,” said Siddhartha Pandey, representative of the Oberthur Technologies in Nepal. The firm had proposed that the passport could be printed with additional pages at $5.4.
Officials at the Ministry of Law and Justice, and Finance Ministry opposed such a move citing additional financial burden for the applicants.

The French company has printed 4.5 million passports as the existing agreement, of which 3.5 million have already been issued to the applicants.  

Under the new agreement, Oberthur will have to install around 50 live enrollment centres in 7-8 countries that have higher number of Nepalis. The company will hand over the entire data to the government after the completion of the contract in two years before initiating a fresh tender for e-passport or biometric passport—a mandatory provision of the international civil aviation authority.

Published on: 6 July 2015 | The Kathmandu Post