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New Delhi The country’s first
e-passport, which will make travel easy, is
expected to be issued next month.
It will
be issued to diplomats and officials first.
Others may have to wait for about 10 months --
or even more.
If all goes well, the first
e-passport will be issued around June 15 to
President Pratibha Patil or Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh -- or both.
The e-passport
project is on a roll. A recent test conducted in
a US government laboratory was so impressive
that American officials remarked that they would
need to study the Indian technology.
An
eight-member official Indian delegation this
month visited Washington carrying 25 test
e-passports made in India.
The e-passport
will have thicker front and back covers. The
rear cover will have a small silicon chip,
smaller than a postage stamp, as well as an
embedded rectangular antenna.
The eight
officials, drawn from the ministry of external
affairs, the National Informatics Centre, the
Indian Security Press (Nasik) and the Indian
Institute of Technology-Kanpur, had an
appointment to keep at the inter-operability
test centre in the US Department of Homeland
Security.
All the e-passports were
scanned at multiple 'readers' to check if they
could be read smoothly. Of the five companies
involved in the project, the passports of two
could not be read - the rest passed with flying
colours.
"We found that while the
American e-passport took a minimum of 10 seconds
to be read, our passports took just four
seconds," said a beaming Indian official,
speaking on condition of
anonymity.
According to a member of the
team, the reason for the quicker response of the
chip in Indian passports was the software
developed by IIT-Kanpur and NIC.
"Unlike
the US software which is proprietary and
developed by vendors, ours is entirely made
in-house. So there is no commercial aspect to
it," Rajat Moona, professor of computer science
at IIT-Kanpur, said.
And those extra
seconds will make valuable difference when the
immigration deals with long queues."The
Americans were highly impressed,’’official
said.
Indo-Asian News
Service | 
