Despite the promises made by successive government to improve public service delivery, only those trying to avail it know the ordeal that they have to put through. Getting a passport is one such time of tribulation, what with hundreds of thousands of youths aspiring to go abroad as migrant workers or for higher studies. The new government has thus decided to begin its first hundred days in office by improving service delivery at the Department of Passports (DoP). Although things will not improve overnight, the visit by Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Rabi Lamichhane to the department at Tripureswor on Wednesday is expected to bring order in the distribution of passports over time. Minister Lamichhane must have seen for himself the long queues of people who were wasting hours of their precious time to get a passport. And although there is a Citizen's Charter explaining how to apply for and get a passport, the crowd at the department can be quite unnerving, impelling the service-seekers to seek the helping hands of middlemen who are able to get things done faster.

The DoP has a capacity to serve 2,000 people daily, but it is having to provide services to as many as 6,000 people, including applications received from the districts.

This is more than three times the number of passports that the department is able to print daily. It is evident that the department is short of staff members, and its efficiency is unlikely to improve without adding more trained personnel. The department introduced electronic passports since November last year, although the machine-readable passport (MRP), introduced in 2010, would still be accepted worldwide for many more years to come. But for the e-passport, the government has made the National Identity Card mandatory, for which also people queue up throughout the night, as there is no chance of getting hold of the few hundred tokens distributed in Kathmandu. Passports don't come cheap either in Nepal, with a passport being prepared from the district administration office (DAO) for Rs 5,000 or Rs 10,000 for 34 and 66 pages respectively. But an urgent passport made at the DoP in Kathmandu costs Rs 12,000 or Rs 20,000.

Not everyone requires an urgent passport, and the crowd of service-seekers would thin if they got their passports from their respective districts. It takes about two weeks to get a passport from the DAO, but if applied in time it will save a lot of money. The people must be told that they can apply for their passports in all the 77 DAOs and 17 Area Administration Offices. But if people are still flocking to Kathmandu, which entails a lot of expenses in travel and accommodation, then it means that the system of distributing passports is not working properly or simply unreliable.

Following Minister Lamichhane's visit to the DoP, he might as well drop in at some of the DAOs and the Department of National ID and Civil Registration to learn how they are faring. There are many more places, like the Department of Transport Management, responsible for issuing licenses, that demand instant attention of the government if the call for efficient service delivery is not to be limited to mere rhetoric.

Trade route opened

Two-way trade between Nepal and China through the Kyirong-Rasuwagadhi border port resumed formally after a hiatus of almost three years. The Chinese authorities had shut the customs point citing the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, halting the export and import of goods from both the countries.

Nepal's consular office in Lhasa and the Chinese Embassy in Kathmandu said six cargo trucks of Nepali goods worth Rs 5 million passed through the port into China after an official ceremony. Nepali traders exported goods such as bamboo stools, Nepali paper and handicraft items to Lhasa via the Kyirong route.

The Nepal government had been urging the Chinese side to open the customs points to resume free flow of trade between the two sides. Except for the Tatopani customs point, another Hilsa/Purang port was also opened for one-way trade from December 26. Trade through Tatopani, which is the oldest trading point between Nepal and China, has been irregular since the 2015 earthquake, which damaged the infrastructure built there. It also should be resumed for smooth trade between the two countries. The unofficial blockade of the border points for such a long time had caused irreparable financial losses to the business communities of both the countries.

A version of this article appears in the print on December 30, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.