A proposal to transfer all passport verification work in Kolkata to the Security Control Organisation (SCO) has emerged from a backlog of nearly 42,000 applications across police stations. The move is not yet a confirmed administrative order, but it reveals how a process designed to protect the integrity of identity documents can become a source of delay when it is added to the already crowded responsibilities of local police stations.
According to Anandabazar – Kolkata, the proposal has been sent to Lalbazar, the headquarters of the Kolkata Police. A section of the police expects that responsibility for passport-related work could move to SCO officers from next month. The proposal also calls for additional officers to be appointed for the task. Until a formal decision is issued, however, the proposed transfer remains an administrative plan rather than an implemented change.
The immediate problem is the volume of pending applications. The report says that about 42,000 passport applications are currently accumulated at different police stations. These include applications for new passports and requests for renewal of existing passports. The delay is linked to the process of verifying copies of documents submitted by applicants, as well as checking information through visits to applicants’ homes.
The police are required to send copies of documents to the authorities that issued them for verification. The report says that obtaining confirmation from those authorities can take considerable time. At the same time, applicants’ information must be checked at their residences, with photographs taken directly and uploaded. Each step may serve a security purpose, but the combined process has created a large administrative queue.
That queue is also a consequence of where the work currently sits inside the police structure. There is one passport officer at each police station, according to the report. These officers verify documents and conduct field checks, but they are not assigned only to passport work. They must also handle law-and-order duties and assist with criminal investigations.
This division of responsibility is central to the proposed reform. A police officer quoted in the report said that station-level passport officers cannot give their full attention to passport-related work because of their other duties. The result, according to the account, is a process that takes longer than it would if a dedicated team handled verification from a single institutional centre.
The proposal to place the work fully with the SCO is therefore less a change in the security standard than a possible change in administrative ownership. The same verification responsibilities would be handled by officers working in a unit specifically associated with security control and document scrutiny, rather than by personnel whose primary work is tied to the daily operational demands of a police station.
That distinction matters in cities because police stations are often the most visible local units of the state, but they are also multi-purpose institutions. Their staff may be expected to respond to emergencies, maintain public order, investigate offences, manage complaints and perform administrative verification. When new or expanded responsibilities are placed on the same personnel without a corresponding increase in capacity, a delay in one service can be produced by pressure from several unrelated duties.
The passport backlog illustrates that institutional overload. The applications have not necessarily accumulated because the verification requirements are unnecessary. Instead, the delay described in the report appears to arise from the way those requirements are distributed across agencies and personnel. Document-issuing authorities must respond to verification requests, police officers must conduct field checks, and the information must then be uploaded as part of the application process. A delay at any point can hold up the entire application.
The proposed SCO model seeks to bring the work under one roof. Police officials involved in passport work believe that a dedicated arrangement could allow officers to spend their time on verification and enable the process to move faster. In administrative terms, this is an attempt to reduce fragmentation: fewer hand-offs, clearer responsibility and a team whose principal assignment is the same as the service being delivered.
Kolkata has used a similar institutional arrangement before. The report notes that around a decade ago, SCO officers handled passport application verification in areas under the Kolkata Police. The current proposal would therefore represent a return to an earlier model rather than an entirely new experiment.
The history of the proposal also shows why the verification process became more stringent. About two years ago, Kolkata Police’s SCO officers reportedly uncovered a racket in which Bangladeshi citizens allegedly obtained Indian passports using forged documents and false information before travelling abroad. Lalbazar arrested 10 people in connection with the investigation, including a former Kolkata Police employee involved in passport verification and two employees of a city post office, according to the report.
After that case, the police tightened scrutiny for new passport applications and renewals. Copies of documents submitted with applications were required to be sent to the relevant issuing authorities for verification. Police were also instructed to visit applicants’ homes, take photographs directly and upload the information. The measures were intended to strengthen the reliability of the process, but the report links them to longer waiting times for applicants.
This is the institutional tension at the centre of the story. Passport verification must be sufficiently rigorous to prevent identity fraud and misuse of official documents. At the same time, it is a public service used by people who may need to travel for employment, education, family obligations or other time-sensitive reasons. A system that increases scrutiny without increasing dedicated capacity can protect one public objective while weakening another: timely access to a government service.
The proposed transfer also raises a question about how security functions should be organised in large cities. If the same officers are responsible for document verification, public-order work and criminal investigations, the administration must decide which responsibilities receive priority when demand rises. The nearly 42,000 pending applications indicate that the current allocation has not been able to clear the accumulated workload quickly enough.
The report does not establish whether the proposed transfer has been approved by Lalbazar, how many additional officers would be appointed, or what specific operational arrangement would replace the existing station-level system. It also does not provide a projected timeline for clearing the backlog or explain whether the document-issuing authorities involved in verification would change their procedures. These are important gaps because moving responsibility between police units alone may not resolve delays generated outside the police system.
The possible reform therefore needs to be understood as a capacity and coordination question, not simply as a change of office. A dedicated SCO structure could improve accountability if applications are assigned, tracked and completed by officers with a defined mandate. But its effect would depend on staffing, workload distribution, communication with document-issuing authorities and the ability to conduct residential checks and upload information without creating another queue.
For applicants, the significance is immediate. A backlog of this size means that delays are not isolated incidents affecting a few individuals; they have become a city-level administrative issue. The consequences are experienced privately by applicants, but the cause lies in the design of a public system: verification responsibilities are spread across institutions, while police personnel handling them are also required to perform other essential duties.
The proposed shift to the SCO could offer a more specialised administrative channel, particularly because that unit has previously handled passport verification. Yet the evidence currently available confirms only that a proposal has been sent and that some police officials hope implementation may begin next month. The next decisive developments will be Lalbazar’s decision, the appointment of additional officers and the publication of a clear operating process for handling the accumulated applications.
Kolkata’s passport backlog shows the cost of treating verification as an additional task rather than as a service requiring dedicated institutional capacity. The proposed SCO takeover may reduce the pressure on police stations, but whether it delivers faster passports will depend on how the entire verification chain is staffed, coordinated and monitored.
