Trivandrum passport office - corruption unlimited
May 24th, 2007
For the last two days, Malayala Manorama has been running a feature on Trivandrum passport office. The report says that it is a den of corrupt officials. As if it is new news!
Over the years passport fees has been increasing exponentially. At the same time service at trivandrum passport is steadily declining. In fact, if you visit the place you wonder whether the office is functioning so that government employees can torture Kerala citizens. It is even difficult to get inside the office. The queue outside runs sometimes for kilometres and you can see families with small children standing outside sweating like hell. According to manorama, there were even cases of women falling down due to heat and exhaustion.
An easy way to handle this rush would have been to introduce token system. But since it can potentially affect their bribe and other commission agents who roam there, officials are against it. This gets my blood boiling. There are millions of qualified youth without a job. The lucky ones who get a job decides to torture US!
Take any department. People at the top try hard to minimize corruption by relaxing rules and introducing new ones. Tatkal is a scheme for getting fast track passport. They charge heavily as well for it. But if you take your tatkal application to the passport counter, the guy at the counter looks hard to find even very small mistakes and rejects it. Imagine your anger if you came from kollam and has been waiting in the queue for 5 hours!
This is one reason why I love chinese government. They are intelligent enough to introduce death penalty for corruption. I strongly support it since it can be a strong deterrant. But then ever wondered about this? Everyone knows that corruption is illegal and is rampant in Kerala. But how many government employees have been convicted and sentenced to jail in the last 10 years? I bet you can count the number on your fingers!
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May 26th, 2007 at 12:54 am
The quick way out from this is for the public to support and sponsor naxalite organizations monetarily and otherwise. Naxalites know how to deal with such corrupt mongrels!!
August 20th, 2008 at 8:54 am
[...] About a year ago I had written about Trivandrum passport office and the corruption and inefficiency of the staff there. Typically central government offices are efficient than Kerala government departments. The "unionism" cancer is much less in central government offices. But passport offices in Kerala is an exception. The so called "employee associations" breed corruption in passport offices. For example, [...]
November 27th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Inorder to avoid the hardship of common people the following measures are to be taken by the government immediately.
1) Shift the location office from kaithamukku as the office is not spacious to accomadate the entire crowd.
2) Avoid issuing more than 300-400 tokens a day or increase the number of staff for better service
3) Do not provide private entry to the agents and the people who came through agency. Ask them to wait along with the queau for their turn.
4) Provide a seperate queaus for New Passport applicants and Emigration & other correction Applicants.
5) Provide better infrastructure inside the office premises.