Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rahman Malik on Saturday issued instructions to the concerned authorities in Islamabad to make necessary arrangements for issuing the Machine Readable Passports (MRPs) from May 16th, 2011 for the Pakistanis in Bahrain.
The Minister, who held talks with the Ambassador of Pakistan Ikramullah Mehsud at the Bahrain International Airport on Saturday during his transit stopover en-route Saudi Arabia, issued instructions to the Director General Passports to depute technical staff at the Pakistan Mission in Manama with immediate effect.
The Ambassador informed the Minister that the project couldn’t kicked off for non availability of the technical personnel hence causing inordinate delay in the issuance of the MRPs at the Pakistan Mission in Manama.
It is worth noting that the machinery have been installed and tested about three 10 weeks back but the embassy was unable to kick start the MRPs since then. The Minister Interior took a serious note of this inordinate delay in sending technical staff to Manama from Islamabad to execute the project. It has been one of the major priorities of the Government back home in Islamabad to digitized the issuance of passports, ID cards and other relevant documents under the umbrella of NADRA.