In recent weeks, the government has taken some significant steps toward streamlining work in the passport department. One of those has been a crackdown on unauthorised agents and dealers who were wont to throng passport offices offering their services to passport seekers. In quite a few ways and despite occasional cases of fraud, these agents somehow made things easier for those in need of passports. The crackdown on them resulted, therefore, in the passport offices suddenly being unable to deal with the rather huge number of passport applicants. The new offices, along with their new manpower, will hopefully take away much of the pressure off the existing offices. But a mere opening of new offices will not be enough unless the labyrinthine bureaucratic process which has so long been a problem in the passport offices is done away with. One expects that the new offices will not end up being extensions of the red tape one has generally associated with the procedures relating to an issuance or renewal of passports. Of particular concern is the inordinately long time taken for police verification of the information provided by passport seekers. All too often the relevant officials do not visit the addresses mentioned in the applications; but when they do, many of them expect to be gratified financially if the applicant wishes to have his passport speedily granted. That is a shame.

It is such problems that call for attention. At the same time --- and this is a point the authorities have already made note of --- passport forms need to be simpler than the long, pretty redundant documents currently in vogue. Finally, the authorities must get down to serious business about introducing machine-readable passports in order for fraudulence to be put a check to.