Why Bangladesh should opt for e-passport?

BANGLADESH passport has been modified at least four times in last three decades. The seventies' version, a big book, had hard cover. The photograph of the holder was pasted with glue. In the eighties the booklet became smaller. The photograph was laminated to stop forgery. Later, the passport had its number perforated. The existing machine readable passport, introduced in the late nineties, is more or like the passport of many countries. In it the photograph of the holder is laminated. Unfortunately, the contents remained unchanged. Hand-written, personal information take eight pages of the latest passport booklet. On renewal, 10 pages are spent for the purpose. My first passport, issued by the Bangladesh Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia was signed by seven functionaries and bears seven rubber stamping. My latest passport issued by the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington, DC bears thirteen rubber stamping and ten signatures. It gives the impression that Bangladesh is a highly bureaucratic country with a love for rubber stamping its travel document. 

It, in no way, indicates the love for efficiency or systematic functioning. In e-passport, in contrast, all the information about is printed in a single page, with two lines at the bottom, for swiping by immigration personnel to verify authenticity of the travel document. No wonder, that immigration and security personnel at arrival and departure points across the world get annoyed having to go through so many pages of Bangladesh passports to check their validity. Being not machine readable it is often difficult to read the hand-written information of the Bangladesh passports. 

I have been denied boarding ships and aircraft. I have been detained for questioning at several foreign immigration points. And the immigration personnel keen to ascertain that it was not a forged passport. The bottom line: Bangladesh passport is an easy document to forge and cumbersome to glean information from. For the facilitation of safe travel, the UN International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has asked all states, including Bangladesh, to standardise their passports. People now travel not only for business and tourism but also for doing jobs abroad. Bangladeshi workers abroad send home a lot of money in foreign currency. Therefore, it is relevant for the government of Bangladesh to abide by ICAO rules. 

Thee main difference between an e-passport and its older cousin, the machine readable passport, is that the former has an additional embedded micro-chip -- containing all the vital identification information -- and an antenna to communicate by radio with a base station located at the immigration check-point. Known as radio frequency identification chip, it uses the same technology used in a wide variety of applications such as inventory control in a retail store or a hospital, where the number of items, needing verification are in the millions. In addition to the biographic data, many countries have started checking biometric data for face recognition, fingerprints checking and iris scanning. Passport RFID chips make it possible. 

The immigration personnel can check it all without even touching an e-passport. It saves time. It is also user-friendly. Pre-programmed and extremely hard to tamper, RFID chip makes e-passport a secure document. The United States is now issuing "enhanced driver's licence (EDL)", based on this technology so that US citizens can travel to the neighbouring countries without a passport by car or ship. It is impossible to upgrade a machine readable passport booklet to an e-passport. But, the data on the RFID chip can be upgraded easily and any time. Bangladesh should replace its existing passport booklet with e-passport to meet its ICAO obligations. The UK, for instance, has extended visa-free travel facilities to holders of Taiwanese e-passport. Introduction of e-passport will benefit Bangladesh economy. Bangladesh should take the logical option rather than go for outdated passport documents. Machine readable passport creates the opportunity for corruption. E-passport does not. The writer lives in Vancouver, USA Source: