Business community in a meeting at Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (ICCI) has expressed great annoyance over inordinate delay in the issuance of passports on account of faulty machines and called upon the government to take urgent remedial measures for resolving the problems of passport seekers in obtaining passports.

Chairing the meeting, Zahid Maqbool, President ICCI said that about 250,000 passport applications are reportedly lying in queue in the Islamabad Passport Office and this situation has deprived many entrepreneurs of prospective business opportunities in foreign countries as they could not undertake business trips on time due to long delay in issuance of passports.

He said government should take cognizance of the seriousness of  problem as reportedly only one machine is operative while all the other machines, which were imported by spending sufficient amount of precious foreign exchange, are lying faulty.

He said this is not only a great loss to the national exchequer, but passport seekers are also suffering badly as these faulty machines are causing excessive delays in the delivery of passports to the applicants.

Businessmen were further perturbed over the fact that though latest passport making machines were imported on high cost, but no proper training was imparted to concerned manpower to operate and rectify these machines in case of development of any technical fault. This is the root cause of the current problem, they said.

They urged upon the Interior Ministry to give high priority to this matter and take urgent steps to get the machines rectified so that passport seekers including business community could be saved from further trouble. They also stressed that concerned staff should be properly trained so that applicants may not face such acute problems in future.