No more orange passports, but why did govt blunder on the last page?
After a justifiable outcry over its proposal of orange passports, the ministry decided to scrap the decision.
Our government moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. After justifiable outcry over its proposal of orange passports for “unskilled workers”, the ministry of external affairs has decided to scrap the decision.
But here lies the twist. The decision for the orange passports had been born out of a desire to help not the unskilled workers, but to deal with issues related to passports of children of single parents and adopted children. While the original solution was decidedly an overkill, its scrapping has left unaddressed the cause of such women and children.
A release by the ministry on January 30 read: “After comprehensive discussions with the various stakeholders, the MEA has decided to continue with the current practice of printing of the last page of the passport and not to issue a separate passport with orange colour jacket to ECR passport holders.”
ECR or “Emigration Check Required” passports are those that require an emigration clearance certificate from the office of Protector of Emigrants. Applicants who haven’t cleared Class 10 are given a passport with ECR category, and can travel to a group of 18 countries for work only after the ECR clearance.
At present, the last page of an Indian passport contains the names of the applicants’ parents and their verified addresses. This is also the page which mentions the applicants’ ECR status. For inexplicable reasons, the integrity of the last page seems inviolable to the MEA – if the page has to stay, all this information stays, or the page goes altogether.
The government had earlier set up a committee to “examine various issues pertaining to passport applications where mother/child had insisted that the name of the father should not be mentioned in the passport and also relating to passport issues to children with single parent and to adopted children”.
According to the ministry’s website: “One of the recommendations of the Committee was that the Ministry of External Affairs should explore the possibility of doing away with the printing of information contained in the Passport Booklet such as names of father/legal guardian, mother, spouse, and address contained in the last page of the passport.”
The ministry took this to mean that the entire last page of the passport should be done away with, and not just the guardian and spouse columns.
Now this posed another challenge – the ECR details of the applicants were mentioned on this page, and if the page did not exist, how would that information be recorded? Apparently, not by entering it on the first page, which records all the information mandatory for a traveller under the International Civil Aviation Organization guidelines. The only way, the government decided, was to come up with a differently coloured passport for such workers.
Understandably, this shifted the discourse from the need to mention fathers' and spouses' names on passports to how discriminatory the move to go orange was.
There were also arguments on whether doing away with the address on the passport would deprive immigrants of an address proof, and if this was another indirect push to make Aadhaar cards indispensable.
Now, after the hue and cry, the government has scrapped the move, and the original intended beneficiaries – “passport applications where mother/child had insisted that the name of the father should not be mentioned in the passport and also relating to passport issues to children with single parent and to adopted children” – see absolutely no change in their status.
Despite there being no legal requirement of mentioning the father’s name on the passport, cases have come to light of officials harassing applicants by insisting on the information. A clear stand from the government on the matter would have helped resolve such cases.
However, the MEA’s handling of the issue meant that all the attention was taken up by the colour change proposal and there was absolutely no discussion of this issue. Now, under pressure, its final decision has meant that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.