JEDDAH, 1 June 2007 — The Consulate General of India here has denied reports that about 500 blank passport booklets went missing from the Indian mission in Jeddah.
“Not a single passport booklet is either missing or stolen from the Jeddah Consulate and all booklets received by the consulate from the Government of India’s Printing Press in Nashik, Maharashtra, are duly accounted for,” said an Indian Consulate statement here yesterday.
The denial came in response to reports in Indian newspapers that hundreds of blank passport booklets and thousands of visa stickers were found missing or stolen from at least 16 Indian missions abroad, including the one in Jeddah.
The newspapers based their stories on the Comptroller and Auditor-General’s report that was tabled in Parliament last week. The CAG performance audit of the passport, visa and consular services had been conducted from December 2005 to September 2006.
According to the consulate, the confusion may have arisen because of the fact that passport booklets and visa stickers dispatched to one mission do sometimes land at some other mission inadvertently.
“In such cases,” the statement from the consulate said, “the mission that receives the passport booklets/visa stickers inadvertently, utilizes them instead of returning them back to the government press. But, of course, an acknowledgment is duly sent to the government press.”
The Indian Consulate pointed out that the process of sorting out such cases through correspondence among the “receiving mission” (to whom the booklets were not meant but wrongly sent), the mission to whom the booklets were required to be sent but were not dispatched, and the printing press takes quite some time.
“The audit authorities are, however, apprised of the status after the sorting out is done,” the statement said. “Till such time, the matter is treated as pending.”
The CAG report also mentioned about 500 missing passport booklets from the High Commission in Kampala. The Indian Consulate in Houston and the Indian Embassy in Baghdad reported the loss of 400 and 40 passports, respectively.
Around 2,000 visa stickers were reported lost from the Indian Embassy in Moscow, while as many as 19 missions and posts reported multiple loss of either passports or visa stickers or both, according to the CAG report.
Although Indian passports can only be issued to its nationals, Delhi, Mumbai and Bareilly regional passport offices issued at least 12 passports to foreign nationals from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the CAG report said.
