Passport Seva Kendras (PSK) have seen a huge jump in the number of applications received, averaging a million every month, according to Ministry of External Affairs and Tata Consultancy Services officials.
An initiative to extend PSK operations through the head post offices across the country is expected to expand the reach further. Fifty eight Post office PSKs (POPSKs) have been deployed across the country this year, and have helped generate 350,000 passports so far in addition to the 93 existing PSKs.
TCS bagged the project back in 2008 and started pilots in 2010. Today the PSK services employ over 5,700 employees, apart from the post office and law enforcement staff, with almost 3,000 of them being TCS employees. The IT giant has fine-tuned the service to the extent that PSKs can be replicated across the country in a matter of weeks, starting from the software and backend technology requirement to the colour scheme of the physical centres.
"Earlier when there were only 37 passport offices across the country, people had to arrange travel and stay from far off places and there was no way to track how the application was proceeding in the system. PSKs made the procedure transparent and easy to track. POPSKs brought them even closer home," said Rajesh Dogra, Head-All India Operations and Citizen Service Delivery, Passport Seva Project. Almost 50,000 applicants across the PSKs log feedback across all parameters of the service daily, he said.
Of the 800-odd head post offices across the country, 236 have been identified for the first leg of POPSK implementation. The first phase consists of 86 centres, 58 of which were made functional within nine months. The remaining 28 will be deployed in the next six months with another 149 centres in the pipeline. The goal is to have at least one PSK or POPSK within a 50-km radius said Arun Chatterjee, Joint Secretary(Passport Seva Project) & Chief Passport Officer.
In terms of opportunities, this has brought TCS immense credibility and recognition in deploying and maintaining packaged services although they do not discuss how the financial returns have panned out.
"PSKs are among the most popular requests from ministers for their constituencies. Delegations from across the globe including Australia and UK have been making trips to PSKs to see them in action and it is certainly a model that other departments and projects seek to replicate," said Chatterjee.
At the initial stage there were a few hurdles in getting the IT and regional passport office staff to work together who had an average age gap of 23 years. However, extensive training programmes and streamlines procedures helped to iron out pain points.
"Apart from call centres and mobile applications there are also Twitter teams tracking grievances on social media for passport application related issues. There is also a whole lot of analytics that helps to identify bottlenecks in the system and speed up the process. The fact that we were able to innovate on multiple levels by introducing the Passpor t Seva Laghu Kendra, Passport Mela and POPSKs to increase the outreach is a matter of great pride for us," added Shalini Mathur, Project Director, Passport Seva Project .
One of the biggest achievements of the project has been the successful deployment of PSKs across the north eastern states with another nine in the pipeline in Assam to cater to the huge demand for the services, they said.