Passport in Sindh

There are only eight passport offices in Sindh – four in Karachi while the rest are in Larkana, Hyderabad, Sukkur and Nawabshah. The regional passport office Hyderabad deals with 11 districts: Mirpurkhas, Mithi, Umer Kot, Badin, Thatta, Sujawal, Tando Allahyar, Jamshoro, Matiari/Hala, Tando Muhammad Khan and Hyderabad itself. On the other hand, Punjab has 37, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has 16, while Balochistan with a population of 13 million has seven regional passport offices.

In Rawalpindi district alone, there are three passport offices. Kahuta tehsil with a population of 153,000 and Gujjar Khan tehsil with 493,000 population have one RPO each. Compared to this, the population of Mirpurkhas is 1.569 million, Badin 1.137 million and Thatta 1.113 million. On the other hand we see that Hafizabad district which has a population of 1.2 million, Chakwal (1.084 million) and Chiniot with 965,124 people have passport offices in these districts. The point of these statistics is that the people in Sindh have been facing great difficulties due to the single RPO for 11 districts. The interior minister is requested to set up more passport offices in Sindh in proportion to the size of the population.

Shahid Ahmed Qureshi

Badin