After missing at least three internal deadlines, the Passport Seva Project, which aims to issue passports in three days compared with the current 45, is finally expected to be launched in "a week or two", said a senior official at the ministry of external affairs.

"The infrastructure is in place, the software glitches have been fixed, security issues have been addressed," the official, who did not want to be identified, said. "Everything has been fully tested. We are just giving final touches and hope to make an announcement (launch) in a week or two at the most."

The ministry had hired the nation's largest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) in October 2008 to implement the Rs1,000 crore project, India's largest e-governance programme on a public-private partnership (PPP) model.

A TCS spokesperson said in an email that the company, as a policy, didn't comment on individual clients.

Apart from reducing the time needed for issuing new passports to three days from up to 45 days now, after police verification, the project has a fast-track component for issuing passports on the same day an application is submitted, a process that now takes up to 14 days.

The new model will also allow people to submit their passport applications online and maintain a central database that can be accessed by both the police and passport officials, speeding up the police verification process, a bottleneck in the current process.

Source: Live Mint By Lison Joseph Three-day passport project in a week or two