Post Office Passport Seva Kendra in Salem to cut applicants’ time

The POPS is one of the latest measures initiated by the Centre to make the process of obtaining passport hassle-free. 

Keeping in line with the Centre’s announcement, steps are under way at the Salem post office and the works were inspected by the Regional Passport Officer (RPO), Coimbatore, S Sasikumar on Monday. The new facility in a tier II city like Salem would also help applicants from tier three cities and rural areas to get passports faster besides saving a lot of time and travel.

The Centre has plans to set up 56 POPS across the country this year and all of them, which will be located mostly in head post offices, are expected to be operational before end of March.“The Centre has made Tamil Nadu proud as the State has been given two of these centres (Salem and Vellore). Salem is likely to be the first POPS Kendra in the State. Of the 800 passport applications processed at the Regional Passport Office in Coimbatore, nearly 200 are from Salem.” Said Sasikumar. 

Conveying that the regional passport office in Coimbatore has processed over 1.2 lakh passport applications this financial year, the passport officer said that the average time taken to issue passports in Coimbatore was less than 21 days. “With this facility in place, the number of applications that will be submitted to Coimbatore will be less and the rest will go to Salem. As a result, this will reduce a lot of time in both the centres at Coimbatore and Salem. Since the volume of applications in Salem is comparatively less, the entire process will take less than 15 days,” he added. 

According to him, this could lead to an increase in the number of passport applications processed by them. However, passport applicants from Dharmapuri, Namakkal and Erode that are close to Salem than Coimbatore will, have to approach Coimbatore office only for the time being. “After studying the performance of POPS in Salem, we will consider linking Namakkal and Erode with the Salem POPS by May or June,” the regional passport officer said. 

Since Dharmapuri district comes under Chennai region, Sasikumar said, there were little chance for that region to get linked to the POPS at Vellore. 

Staff from the passport office in Coimbatore will be posted at the POPS on deputation to handle the procedures and to train postal department employees in handling the applications. “The POPS will be completely handed over to the postal department in less than four months,” he added.