The Department of Passport (DoP) informed that it has e-passports in stock enough to maintain supply for a year.

"We have 10,21,700 copies of passports. According to our estimates, the stock will be enough to cover the demand for a year," said Tirtha Raj Aryal, Director General of the DoP in an interaction with the journalists. The agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) is taking measures to avoid a gap between supply and demand of passports. In 2022/23, the DoP had issued 833,476 passports.

Aryal's statement has come in the wake of recent controversy on the tendering of e-passport printing that the Department's bidding requirement favoured IDEMIA, a French company that has been working with the DoP in printing the Machine-Readable Passports (MRPs).

Following the publication of the notice, multiple complaints were filed with various authorities including the Prime Minister's Office and the Commission for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority (CIAA) and Public Procurement Monitoring Office (PPMO), the Department has revised the tender document.

Other concerned agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and parliamentary committees also received complaints. writes The Rising Nepal.