The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is all set to deploy at least four official teams to four labour destination countries to facilitate Nepalis working there to replace their old handwritten passports with machine readable ones. 

MoFA and the Ministry of Labour and Employment have already cleared the deck to send four teams to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Over three fourth of total Nepali labourers are working in these job destinations.

Two officials from the Department of Passport and one from MoLE will be in each team. Officials from the embassies of Nepal in these countries will also join them.

“The government has already cleared a process of deploying teams to these labour destination countries to facilitate the people to replace their old passports with new ones,” Lok Bahadur Thapa, Director General, DoP, told THT. “If things go as planned, these teams will leave for these countries within a couple of weeks.”

These four teams will stay in these destination countries for 15 days to one month. During their stay, they will 

encourage, motivate and facilitate the Nepali workers who are still holding the old hand written passports to replace them with machine readable ones.

As per the deadline set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, Nepal needs to replace all previously issued handwritten passport by November 24 next year. 

After that, those holding handwritten passports will not be able to make international flights.

According to Director General Thapa, DoP aims to replace around 50,000 to 66,000 handwritten passports in each of these destination countries during the month long campaign.

“However, the whole campaign is contingent upon the amount of cooperation Nepalis in these concerned countries extend,” Thapa added. “Nepali community’s help will be crucial to inform the concerned ordinary passport holders and help them fill the forms.”

MoFA has already issues circulars to Nepali missions in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE to mobilise Nepali communities such as Non-Resident Nepali Association to inform and make Nepali migrants workers aware about the campaign. 

The government has also directed the concerned missions to seek due permission from the concerned countries, if necessary, to set up roaming offices and necessary equipment in places where the concentration of Nepalis is high so that they could easily fill and process their forms for acquiring machine readable passport.

Published on: 7 February 2015 | The Himalayan Times