Kathmandu, Nov 18 (SocialNews.XYZ) Nepal has started issuing e-passports for the first time.
Foreign Minister Narayan Khadka inaugurated the e-passport personalization center at the Department of Passport and handed over the country's first-ever e-passport to Satya Mohan Joshi, a 102-year-old historian, the department said in a press statement on Wednesday.
E-passports will ultimately replace the machine-readable passports, which were introduced in 2010 to replace the decades-old handwritten passports in Nepal, Xinhua news agency reported.
"Only limited e-passports will be issued for a few days as the system is still in the testing phase," Sharad Raj Aran, spokesman for the Department of Passport, told Xinhua.
The department plans to issue e-passports in a full manner within three weeks, while District Administration Offices and other offices authorized to issue passports in various parts of the country will start issuing e-passports by December, and Nepali diplomatic missions abroad will issue e-passports in January 2022, according to the press statement.
Aran said all offices would continue to issue machine-readable passports alongside e-passports until necessary infrastructure is ready for e-passports only.
"We plan to fully go into the e-passport regime by January end," he added.
Source: IANS
About Gopi
Gopi Adusumilli is a Programmer. He is the editor of SocialNews.XYZ and President of AGK Fire Inc.
He enjoys designing websites, developing mobile applications and publishing news articles on current events from various authenticated news sources.
When it comes to writing he likes to write about current world politics and Indian Movies. His future plans include developing SocialNews.XYZ into a News website that has no bias or judgment towards any.
He can be reached at gopi@socialnews.xyz