Passport office a madhouse

For anyone who needs to have a new passport, there is office is located in a place called ‘Awami Markaz’ in the city. It is not really The Passport Office, it is the office where the documents for making passport are prepared. It is just another way for the government forget the military regime to make the life of the people as miserable as possible Instead making the acquiring of passports a simple one there is a terrible, unnecessary long and tedious procedure which have to be followed.
Tax payers have every right to demand that the government should issue passports free of charge instead of being asked to pay for them as passports are a fundamental right of every citizen in the country.
The passport office at ‘Awami Markaz’ is a hellish place, because countless people are standing in line for hours on end. When the procedure of the documents is completed the passports are issued at another office which was originally was the place where passport office and is located which is in the city centre.
The time in getting those documents at the ‘passport office’ in a single day ranges from 5 to 8 hours. But if some meaningless detail has been left out by someone. Then that person will have to go through the entire exercise for the next few days till the crooked passport office officials are satisfied. In most cases when it becomes so nerve wracking, the way out usually is to get the help of some very influential person who can browbeat the officials at the passport office alternatively bribe the staff over there.
The ‘passport office’ place is extremely filthy, badly maintained and completely disorganised. It is obvious the government wants to discourage people from having passports in the first place. Many people drop the very idea of having a passport , because they are driven them away by the utter chaos, stench and dirt everywhere.
The civilised thing to do for government , is not to set up passport offices all over the city, instead provide post offices in every area with passport forms, which should be given free of charge to anyone who asks for them. The form should be simple to fill and available in different regional languages. All that the person should be required to do is write down his (or her) name and identity card number. Mailing the form should to the concerned ministry should also be free of charge, The ministry’s staff should rely on the information available at the identity card department NADRA. After the passport has been made, it should be delivered to the concerned person and ministry should also pay for delivering it.
But under prevailing circumstances General Musharraf and his Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz travel all over the world a the taxpayers’ expense with planeloads of hangers-on– the result is that the government runs out of money and is unable to provide a simple facility like giving free passport to the country’s citizens. This has been done before and will continue long after the existing military regime vanishes.
There is long standing prejudice against ordinary people travelling abroad, it is generally perceived as a crime. The elitist thinking is that only the rich and the privileged should be entitled to travel abroad and everyone else stay back. As for those who run the country, they can travel anywhere in the world without having to pay anything but their world tours in no way benefit the country in any way. They claim to be going on official trips actually they are nothing but an excuse to go on pleasure trips at the cost of the country.
So a simple thing of getting a passport is turned into a maddening issue. For no reason at all. The only reason is that civil servants wan to make be paid hefty bribes for things they can do. very easily.
After going through this insane experience it very easy to call the passport office a madhouse.