Kathmandu, April 27:

With the country is bracing for a new government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is awaiting new government’s decision to process and issue Machine Readable Passport (MRP) to make Nepali passports compatible with the other countries as standardised by International Civil Aviation Organisation.

“Though ICAO directed all the countries to standardise the passports on MRP format by 2010 and the MoFA has already completed a preliminary study, we could not proceed the task of issuing MPP due to instability in the country,” said Gopal Bahadur Thapa, chief of Protocol Division at the MoFA.

“We also forwarded a report on MRP to the government in February but the decision was shelved due to constituent assembly elections. As the new government will be formed sooner or later, we are awaiting its decision to proceed it,” he said.

An MRP is machine compatible passport with a special zone where information is encoded in optical character recognition format. All the information about a passport bearer encoded in the special zone of the passport can be read by immigration officials when swiped in a machine.

According to the MoFA report, the ministry will itself issue all the MRPs and equip all the district offices with scanners, digital cameras and Internet facilities. The district offices will correspond with the main office and the latter will enter data, process the information and print the final copy.

“This will also require the main office to have a separate building to accommodate machines and server, recruit more staff and design a software. The upgrading task in the centre as well as in districts will cost at least Rs 50 million,” added Thapa.

He said the new system would prevent the passports from being copied as compared to the manual passports as machines would process everything.

According to MoFA, each passport will cost approximately $100 and the passport issued till 2009 will be valid till 2015.