Passport saga - contd.

Much has transpired in this story since I last posted about this here - Passport for minor - quite a Major affair? so I thought it was time I shared a little more about this process.

I applied for my son's passport on 19th Aug 2010 so was not really expecting to hear much about it very soon. They also told me at the Bangalore One centre that it could take a maximum of 75 days and I wasn't in any particular hurry, so put it out of my mind for a while. Much to my surprize sometime around mid-September I got a call from the local police station that they wanted to do police verification for his passport. Now it says over and over again wherever I checked online as well as in the passport application, that "No police verification will be done for minors if both parents have valid passports" and of course these details must be entered in the application which I had dutifully done.

I was asked to bring two passport size photos of S, copies of the parents passports and of course S himself and land up at the police station. All through the process I kept asking why this was being done in the first place but they could only answer "If we get the form, we have to do it madam!". On meeting the police, I found to my irritation that S's year of birth had been amended from 2008 to 2000 according to their data!! (No wonder they wanted police verification for this 10 yr old who submitted a 2 yr old's photo?!) Apparently the person who did the data entry at the RPO or PSK (Passport Seva Kendra) made a mistake in that last digit. I showed the police the receipt I had got from B-One which showed that I had entered it correctly in the application - the policeman assured me that he would write a note and get it corrected before the passport is issued, but i'm prepared for the worst :(.

All formalities completed (which involved getting 4 more thumbprints from S!), documents submitted, and I walked away from the PS without paying anything "extra". To their credit they did not ask either, maybe because they realized my state of mind, and I was determined not to offer anyway. Now keeping fingers crossed and waiting to receive the passport before I get to know if the date of birth is correct or if I have to run around in any more circles for this.