Saturday, June 12, 2010

Applying Passport : What you should not do?

I went through a really long process of three months to get my passport reissued. To get passport follow the process verbatim as specified in the RPO website. Here i list some small set of steps which can help you a lot:

  • Check the police station in which your building falls: This was my basic mistake. I wrote the nearest police station to my home but actually it was some other station. If it goes to the wrong station, it is sent back to commissioner office before reaching your actual station. this is a long and tedious process which may not happen automatically. this can delay the whole process my a month or two.
  • Check in the police station with 2-3 days of submitting your application: The application is sent very soon. so check with your police station about the application so that you can speed up the process if it has gone to a wrong police station.
  • In case it is commissioner's office, you can go there between 3-5 PM with a copy of the passport receipt and a written letter and submit it. They will inform you where the Police Verification (PV) file is.
  • See the site regularly and keep track of status. In case it is going slow then you can convert it into a tatkal. For this you have to go and get application from the RPO (this is in koramangala in case of Bangalore). If you go early better. It is open from 9.30 to 12.30 and usually has a long queue.
  • If it is dispatched it reaches your post office in a day or two. So check with the local postman. If you do not collect the passport in 7 days it is sent back to the RPO.
  • And lastly, if you need it urgently just apply for tatkal as the normal process does not happen in less than 2-3 months though the passport office claim they do it in one month.
  • Also if possible do not change the address, then no police verification is needed. this is the most time consuming operation.
Last week the process is now outsourced to TCS in Bangalore. So may be the above learning may not be relevant now. Hope no one have to suffer so much to get the passport reissued.

TVS King review

Recently a new auto rickshaw got launched in the otherwise boring segment. This auto TVS King seems to be a 200cc vehicle but in ground seems to be really powerful with respect to the old bajaj. It is quite comfortable while travelling with the seat solidly fixed onto the pedestal. Shock absorber may be slightly better than the old Bajaj ones. And what really bowled me off was that it covered my travel from palakkad railway station to my home in same time as the car travel. So may be if u get a choice, try going for a TVS auto. Hope over time the drivers in this vehicle also become less arrogant compared to the present auto drivers in Bangalore.