HYDERABAD: Until last week, it was a morning ritual that unfolded outside passport office every single day. Hundreds of people would tumble out of packed rickety vehicles every morning after braving a long journey from various districts to reach the Regional Passport Office (RPO) in Hyderabad.

Clutching their documents and holding bags and babies, they would stand in a serpentine queue from 7 am, to brave a long wait and the sun before their turn would come to submit their applications. Rude police personnel at the gates made the long wait more painful, asking a dozen questions before allowing applicants inside. Once inside, they would sit on the floor or even lie down resting their heads on their bags to endure the wait.

But last week, the queue tired of waiting for many hours, turned into an irate mob and was lathi-charged by the police, who did not spare even women. It was the same RPO that in the year 2003 had dispatched a record 30,000 passports in three weeks, aiming to get an ISO-9000 certification. In the years to come, however, the office ensured that such achievements were undone. Applications started piling up soon after, until 2008 when the new passport officer took over, trying to put some order in the chaos. The results have been limited so far.

Following the lathi-charge incident, however, the passport office took decisions that were long overdue. Within a day, it was announced that people coming from districts could submit their applications to IATA agents, authorised by the passport office, in their district itself. While the queue has shrunk ever since, but the long wait still continues. The passport office on weekday afternoons resembles a railway platform, where people await their turn sitting on the floor, getting the elusive chair to sit on occasionally.

The Regional Passport Office in Hyderabad is said to be the second largest passport office in the country after Mumbai but the state of affairs of this office have ensured that applicants have many sleepless nights. While the regional passport officer, Srinivas Gotru, ironed out one difficulty that of reducing applicant numbers at the office’s doorstep. The RPO handles passport applications from 18 districts, while the office in Vishakapatnam which was started in 1997 handles applications from the five coastal districts.

Sources say that the Hyderabad office has more on its hand than what it can handle. With a workforce of 150, of which just about 30 to 40 employees are handling passport applications and miscellaneous services, the office delivered over 3 lakh passport related services in the calendar year of 2008-09. The revenue generated during this period was Rs 42.2 crore and as per the official records, “the average time taken for issuing passports in ordinary (non-Tatkal) category was 50 days. The office had received 3.9 lakh fresh applications during this period.

While this may give the impression of a smooth-functioning department delivering passports on time, applicants give a different version altogether. Woes of innumerable passport applicants have been flooding the ‘Pillar to Post’ columns of this newspaper everyday and one comes across hundreds of such applicants hovering around the passport office. While some have been waiting for months on end to get their passport, others are left high and dry with a passport but their application for ‘police clearance certificate’ delayed costing them their jobs and education opportunities abroad.

Take for instance, the case of Salman Hussain who has to go to UAE but has not been able to for the last six months, thanks to the passport office. Another applicant, Nayeem, also on his way to UAE has hit a roadblock with the PCC not coming his way. In another case, Srikumar, a software engineer, has made 10 trips to the passport office since last November with his new-born son’s application for a passport. Having postponed his impending trip to the US several times, Srikumar shows a neatly filed record of dates on which he visited the RPO, none of which yielded any results.

Significantly, in his official statement for the year 2009, the RPO had stated that as many as 20,687 applications were under various “objections’’, of which 9,115 were not recommended by the police. As many as 3,300 applications were closed due to lack of response from the applicants. Predictably, there are many agents offering quick-fix solutions to harried applicants, offering their service for anywhere between Rs 1,000 to Rs 4,000, depending on the kind of ‘contacts’ the agent enjoys inside the office.

Now, with the passport office roping in an IT services major to streamline operations, applicants can hope for some respite.