Passport Department refutes media reports

Kathmandu, Feb. 5: The Department of Passport (DoP) informed on Tuesday that it has e-passports in stock enough to maintain supply for a year. 

"We have 10,21,700 copies of passports. According to our estimates, the stock will be enough to cover the demand for a year," said Tirtha Raj Aryal, Director General of the DoP in an interaction with the journalists. The agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) is taking measures to avoid a gap between supply and demand of passports. In 2022/23, the DoP had issued 833,476 passports. 

Aryal's statement has come in the wake of recent controversy on the tendering of e-passport printing that the Department's bidding requirement favoured IDEMIA, a French company that has been working with the DoP in printing the Machine-Readable Passports (MRPs). 

Following the publication of the notice, multiple complaints were filed with various authorities including the Prime Minister's Office and the Commission for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority (CIAA) and Public Procurement Monitoring Office (PPMO), the Department has revised the tender document. 

Other concerned agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and parliamentary committees also received complaints. 

The PPMO had asked the DoP to address the complaints of which the former received from at least six companies. Likewise, the CIAA also initiated an investigation on the complaints that it received about the potential irregularities in the e-passport procurement process. 

However, the DoP said that the bidding document was amended as per the suggestions made by various companies that showed interest in printing the passport. In a pre-bid meeting organised by the Department, 22 companies participated and requested for making some amendments in the initial notice. "So, we amended the bid notice and extended the deadline by a month from 12 January to 11 February, 2025," said Aryal. Initial notice for international bidding was published on 28 November, 2024. 

The bid notice included two packages: procurement of Electronic Machine-Readable Transport Documents (eMRTDs or e-passport) system including pre-enrolment, enrolment, data management and delivery system, and procurement of eMRTDs booklet with personalization, quality control and packing system.

The DoP made another amendment to the bid document on January 20 to allow three companies to apply for the task under a joint-venture arrangement. A provision that would give preference to a single company applying for both the packages was also revised. 

Following the revision to the bid document, a company participating in Package 1 must have an annual turnover of USD 1.2 million over the last three years, while a company participating in Package 2 must have an annual turnover of USD 4 million. A company participating in both packages must have an annual turnover of USD 5.2 million.

Stating that the DoP prepared the bid document including the technical specifications as per the guidelines and standards of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), Aryal said that the Department followed a transparent process that allowed the participation of all potential bidders in it. 

He also refuted the media reports that the DoP prepared the bidding document to favour any particular company or it was influenced by any company. 

Nepal started issuing e-passports on 17 November 2021 and the current MRPs will be in use as far as 2031. The country had transitioned to the MRPs from handwritten passports in 2010.