Case Developed by:
eGOVMMCASES Project Funded by:
Passport at Your Doorstep: A Saga of Service Excellence
The passport seva is an example of one of the Digital India Projects where technology has been leveraged to deliver an existing public service in a simpler, faster, transparent, and cost-effective manner to the customers.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the number of passports issued increased several times due to globalization and the IT revolution. It opened up new avenues of foreign travel for Indian citizens but challenged the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) of GOI regarding passport delivery. There was a massive demand for new passports, but the system could not deliver, resulting in despair and frustration for the citizens. GOI sought the help of the National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG) to study how the passport services could be improvised. NISG took a detailed and incisive study of the entire gamut of passport delivery services and highlighted many areas for improvement. Acting on the report from NISG, MEA got approval from the Union Cabinet in September 2007 to start working on the service reengineering process and entrusted it to NISG. The rollout of e-passport seva was wrought with several challenges and called for business process reengineering at multiple levels of Government and looked forward to reforming it in partnership with a private partner who could define and deliver systematic customer service.
Length of the Case: 1 hr