News
Passport stocks fast deplete; available only for 43 days
View(s):- Minister explains efforts to bring new books by October 27 from Finland company
By Namini Wijedasa
Amidst a continuing delay in implementing a proposed e-passport project, Sri Lanka’s Department of Immigration and Emigration was by Friday left with around 44,200 ordinary passports in stock and is issuing them to the applicants at a tightly controlled rate to avert a total collapse in supplies. The shortage has caused a huge backlog with applicants—many of whom travel from afar, even borrowing money—being turned away, sometimes leading to altercations at the passport office in Battaramulla. Requests for passports lodged with Sri Lanka’s missions are also pending, while students and job aspirants with confirmed commitments abroad are “in a desperate” situation.
The department currently issues 900 passports a day, with another 100 set aside as the “Minister’s quota.” The daily requirement is around 3,000. This means that there are passports left for just around 43 more days.
A foreign company named M/s Thales DIS Finland Oy won a competitive tender earlier this year to supply 5 million e-passports embedded with an electronic chip to the department. The contract is a step towards upgrading from the current machine-readable passports (MRPs) to a more secure e-passport. However, this transition cannot proceed until the necessary “public key infrastructure” (PKI) is procured. This is used to confirm each passport holder’s identity. But the tender is yet to be floated.
A note to the Cabinet submitted by Public Security Minister Tiran Alles—under whose purview the department comes—said Thales has now agreed to supply “a certain quantity” out of its agreed e-passport tender minus the chip by October 27 to tide over the pressing shortage. Thales’s local agent is Just in Time Technologies (Pvt) Ltd.
The note also referred to Thales’s main competitor in the tender, Epic Lanka (Pvt) Ltd, which had supplied MRPs to the department for over 20 years. It said that the Ministry had inquired from the company whether it could provide 100,000 MRPs. It reportedly asked for a minimum order of 500,000 but did not say how much time its principal, Perum Peruri, a public corporation in Indonesia, would need to fulfil the order (although the company had conveyed “verbally” that it would require two months, according to the Minister’s note).
The Minister notified the Cabinet that he had, therefore, issued instructions for the MRPs to be bought from Thales. Authoritative official sources pointed out, however, that his note did not inform the Cabinet how much each ordinary passport from Thales would cost. (Thales’s tendered price for every e-passport supplied was Euro 4.62 or around Rs. 1,516). It was also not immediately clear whether the Cabinet had approved the purchase of MRPs from Thales or how big the order for chip-less books was. These sources also said these books had fewer pages than the alternative.
The procurement process, which started last year, was delayed by various factors, including changes to key bid conditions and even the nature of the contract. The tender initially included the PKI solution, but this was removed via an addendum issued in December 2023. Now a decision has been made to tender separately for the PKI.
That tender is likely to be floated this week or next, Minister Alles told the Sunday Times. He also rejected any suggestion of impropriety and said the shortage of travel documents had occurred because a party that lost the e-passport tender had gone to the Procurement Appeals Board (PAB) in a process that took around six to eight weeks.
Minister Alles pointed out that the department had been buying MRPs from Epic for 23 years without calling for tenders—after the first contract was awarded, there had only been reorders at the price of US$ 5.89 per passport. After he took over and the stock of passports needed replenishing, there was a request for another reorder but he decided that open, worldwide tenders should be called for an e-passport with a chip, he said.
A Cabinet-appointed tender committee, tender boards, etc., were put in place, specifications drawn up, and tenders called. It was eventually awarded to Thales at what the Minister said was US$ 5.05 (although the quoted price in Euros was 4.62).
“The order was placed,” he said. “The issue was that I didn’t want the stock of old passports to remain when the new ones came because all that is Government money. So we planned it in such a way that, by the time the new passport arrives, the old passport stocks were over.” This timeline was scuppered by the PAB process, he claimed. The delay meant “we had to cover two months in some way or another.”
Epic was approached for a two-month stock of 100,000, the minister said, but it insisted that its minimum order should be 500,000. “The company also said it needs eight to six weeks to deliver, and it does not give an exact date,” he maintained. The Sunday Times did not verify this independently from Epic.
In the meantime, the department cut down the number of passports it was issuing each day—“to cater to urgent cases.”
Minister Alles did not confirm how many MRPs would be provided by Thales. “They will keep supplying even up to 750,000 starting from mid-October,” he said. And, while the Public Security Ministry has agreed to this interim solution with Thales, the company has not stated the price at which the non-electronic ordinary passports will be supplied to the department.
“They have said they will reduce a little, they haven’t given the price yet,” the minister said. “Because, see, they are now trying to do a favour for us because they have to change their entire printing process.”
“Only the chip is not there” in the books Thales will supply,” he continued. “What we have said is to reduce the price of the chip.” Even if they sold a book at US$ 5.05, the minister explained, it was still cheaper than US$ 5.89 which the existing supplier quoted.
At the rate of 4.62 Euros, the total cost of 750,000 normal passports—assuming Thales does not reduce the price—will be Euros 3,465,000 or Rs. 1.137 billion. “For me, more than the price, I was trying to see how fast we can get something,” Minister Alles said.
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