Indian government will issue e-passport(Biometric passport) from 2021 || Techebrar

 

If you apply for a new passport in 2021 or want to renew your expired passport, you may now get an e-passport. The e-passport will have an electronic microprocessor chip.

After creating more than 20,000 official and diplomatic e-passports on a trial basis, the Government of India has decided to start the process of creating e-passports for all citizens of the country. And for this the Government of India has also started the process of selecting the NGC.

The agency will provide IT infrastructure and solutions. It is believed that given India's huge population, the e-passport process will be a huge undertaking and it needs to be able to do such a great job.

What is E-Passport ?

An Electronic Passport or ePassport is a passport with an added integrated circuit or chip embedded in one of the passport pages, which can be used at the automated ePassport gates instead of having your passport checked by a Border Force officer. 

The chip stores

• The same data visually displayed on the data page of the passport
• The passport holder picture stored in digital form
• The unique chip identification number
• A digital signature to detect data alteration and verify signing authority
• Additional data, as defined by specific issuing governments.

ePassports are designed to increase security, making it more difficult to change data recorded on a passport and therefore limiting the chance of fraud. This passport will have a better quality of paper, better printing and be enabled with advanced security features. 

Chips used in this E-Passport is highly interoperable; meaning, it can be read by any standard border control machine worldwide. The chip technology allows the information stored in an ePassport to be read by special chip readers at a close distance. It is integrated with high security mechanisms in order to prevent any forceful skimming of data it contains, any cloning, or any remote reading

Once the e-passport is declared, it will be difficult to copy it and in case of international travel, the immigration process will also go smoothly. Until now, India used to have a passport like a printed book with personal information, which is very easy to copy.

India initiated the first phase deployment of Biometric e-Passport only for all diplomatic passport holders in India and abroad in 2008. The e-passport project is under the first phase of deployment and will be initially restricted to diplomatic passport holders only in India.

In the way the Government of India is managing the infrastructure to create e-passports, the agency providing IT infrastructure and solutions will have to issue 10,000 to 20,000 e-passports every hour. And such agencies will be set up in Delhi and Chennai.

The government is working expeditiously on the scheme in view of the growing number of cases like cyber crime, passport fraud and transition to corona. An e-passport can have a touchless feature.

Features of E-Passport

• The new passports will have a 64KB chip with a photograph of passport holder and subsequently include the holder's fingerprint.
• No commercial agency has been involved in keeping the security in mind.
• All e-Passports issued by Visa Waiver Program countries and the United States have security features to prevent the unauthorized reading or “skimming” of data stored on the e-Passport chip.
• The new passports are expected to have thicker front and back covers.
• When time is of the essence in a crowded airport, the e-passport will take a few seconds to read.
• And will have the capacity to store 30 visits and international movements
• The process of passport verification from e-passport will be 10 times faster than at present. And that's one of the coolest features. 
• The ePassport is designed to be read only when open and after a successful read of the machine-readable zone (MRZ) by an ePassport-enabled reader

Countrys that uses e-passport

E-Passports are already being used in more than 60 countries worldwide in december 2008 but now it increased to 120 by June 2017. In Asea, five countries have already issued ePassports (Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia). Malaysia was the first country to issue biometric passports in 1998. There are more than 100 States and non-state entities (i.e. United Nations) currently issuing ePassports, and over 490 million ePassports in circulation.