Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore   

Passport office launches SMS alert facility

— Photo: M. Periasamy

Convenient: Passport Officer B. Balamurugan launching the SMS alert facility for applicants at the Passport Office in Coimbatore on Friday.

Coimbatore: A Short Messaging Service (SMS) alert facility was introduced by the Coimbatore Passport Office on Friday to update the applicants on the status of their applications.

B. Balamurugan, Passport Officer, Coimbatore, launched the facility in the presence of Jothi Shankar and P. Raju, Senior Systems Scientists from Madurai and Kochi respectively along with G. Kamalakannan, Regional Manager of STC, solutions provider.

Earlier, Mr. Balamurugan inaugurated a programme to impart training to 37 staff from District Passport Cells and 21 Speed Post Centres in Head Post Offices in the region that accept manual passport applications at present.

The manual applications are entered into data on the system and then transferred to the passport office server and the process consumes time.

Hence, the District Passport Cells at the Collectorates in Udhagamandalam, Coimbatore, Tirupur, Erode, Namakkal and Salem and 21 Head Post Offices i.e., Speed Post Centres handling passport applications would have to go in for online application submission system by February 15, Mr. Balamurugan said.

To get the SMS alerts, the applicants have to mention their mobile numbers in the applications.

The server-generated SMS will automatically be sent to them at various stages of processing their applications i.e. despatch of police verification papers, receiving police verification report, indexing and completion of Passport Information Services Online (PISON) checking.

SMS will also be sent in the event of any query being raised and also details on the query sent to which department.

The other alerts will be for calling the applicants in the event of a necessity for personal appearance seeking clarifications.

Allotment, grant of passport, printing and despatch will also be informed. A total of 17 types of SMS alerts are possible in the present system.

Those without mobile phones could access the server from any mobile by sending their file number or key number as status enquiry SMS to the mobile number 99426-33100.

The system will help reduce the beeline of applicants turning up for status enquiry every day at the passport office.

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