Madurai: The Regional Passport Office in Madurai has impounded 500 passports found to have forged documents attached to get ECNR (Emigration Check Not Required) in place of ECR (Emigration Check Required) passports, over the last seven months.
These passports fall under the re-issue category where the applicants with ECR passports have submitted forged documents like fake SSLC certificate, income tax payee certificate and forged immigration seals in their passports.
The office had issued the passports but found during verification that the documents had been forged. Hence, they were impounded.
Talking to the media, regional passport officer, S Manishwar Raja, said that ECR passports are issued so that illiterate people going abroad for the first time are protected under 'Protector of Emigrants' (PoE). Such applicants, on employment abroad, should get a temporary non-ECR certificate from the PoE, to verify their employment and other agencies involved. The Indian Government takes measures to protect such emigrants going through PoE when they land in some trouble during their overseas employment, he explained.
Though such protocol is good for emigrants, overseas employment agencies want to avoid this procedure, which takes time. Thus, they insist on ECNR passports. There are several fraudulent agencies that find ways to circumvent it. To facilitate ECR passport holders, these agencies issue fake SSLC certificates, fake immigration seals or get them IT payee certificates with PAN cards. Fake immigration seals are used on passports to show that the applicant was abroad for a substantial period of time. Through these fake documents, the applicants are shown as eligible to get ECNR passports.
Most of the applicants are poor and illiterate people from Ramanathapuram and Kanyakumari districts trying their luck abroad. "They are innocent people paying a considerable sum to these agencies. We have asked the applicants to apply for ECR passports," Manishwar Raja said. The regional passport office has also intimated PoE and local police circles regarding this issue.
The passport office has also appealed to the public to renew handwritten passports into machine readable ones. The airports don't accept handwritten passports any more and the Ministry of External Affairs has already intimated the Regional Passport Offices with circulars, regarding the matter. Anyone having handwritten passports can apply for a new passport which will be issued within three days if their documents are fed into the system without police verification, the RPO said.