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Govt. faces another passport crisis; sets up advisory committee
View(s):By Namini Wijedasa
With Sri Lanka’s current batch of 750,000 passports due to run out between July and September next year, depending on the daily issuance rate, the Public Security Ministry will seek Cabinet approval to allow an expert committee to propose how best to replenish stocks.
The issue was now “a real tangle” which made even calling a new tender problematic, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala admitted. The outcome of the last tender for ePassports—awarded to Thales DIS Finland OY and its Sri Lankan partner, Just In Time (JIT) Technologies (Pvt) Ltd—is before the Appeal Court, challenged by losing bidder Epic Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. “Therefore, it remains in question whether we can get another stock from the same supplier as the matter is in court,” he explained.
But the option of floating a fresh tender, should it be available, also raises a complication: the new edition would be yet another series (Sri Lanka is currently on the P-series, having phased out the N-series around October this year). “That might raise issues with international border controls,” Minister Wijepala said. “A country can’t keep changing its passport all the time.”
Several meetings were held over the past few weeks, with President Anura Kumara Disanayake also chairing some. The issue is being treated as serious and urgent, the minister said. But the government was reluctant to heed solutions prescribed by the Department of Immigration and Emigration (DIE), he admitted because it was a defendant in the Appeal Court case.
“So we have decided to get Cabinet approval to set up an independent expert committee to review the matter and to produce a report within two weeks, as instructed by the President,” he said, adding that the government won’t delay as “there are only seven months left.” The proposal is likely to be submitted at the next meeting.
The DIE is currently using up the “emergency” batch of machine-readable passports (MRPs) bought as a stopgap measure to solve an unprecedented shortage of travel documents caused by the bungled ePassport tender. The 750,000-book consignment is arriving in installments from Thales.
Thales won the DIE’s first-ever ePassport tender in July this year. But Epic challenged the award in the Appeal Court, stating that it believed the bidding process in relation to the procurement “was compromised and/or tainted with mala fides and/or subverted to unduly favour and assist certain vendors and to the undue disadvantage of others.”
In September, the Appeal Court granted an injunction halting the purchase of both MRPs and ePassports pending the consideration of this writ petition. But in October, it issued a varied interim order allowing the then government and the Controller General of Immigration and Emigration to buy MRPs—not ePassports—from “a suitable supplier as per the decision of the Government of Sri Lanka, to overcome the present crisis faced by the country.”
To avoid passport stocks from completely drying up, the new administration chose to procure an emergency consignment from Thales as a stopgap measure (by interpreting the purchase to be part of the ePassport tender that the company had won and which is now challenged). Separately, it was agreed via court that the DIE would pay Epic US$ 1.45 per passport for personalisation.
Epic was the supplier of the N-series and as a new personalisation solution had not been procured in tandem with the ePassport tender—still more evidence of bungling—the DIE remained dependent on Epic for this crucial step. A tender for passport personalisation with two-key encryption has since been advertised.
At present, the DIE is dealing with a backlog of more than 100,000 passport applications as well as new requests. Daily issuance is controlled at around 2,000, with one-day service being the bulk of it.
If the backlog is not cleared and the present issuance rate is maintained, the prevailing stock could be stretched to around September, authoritative DIE sources said. “Otherwise, if we try to raise monthly issuance to around 80,000—as it used to be before the crisis—we will have stocks only till July,” they pointed out.
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