TWO HUNDRED LESS VOTES PER DAY

Jan 31, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Each working day, the PPP loses about two hundred votes because of the operations of the Passport Office. Each day hundreds of Guyanese have to wait hours just to hand in their passports and have their photographs taken.
While early morning lining up has disappeared, they have only disappeared outside the building. No longer are long lines seen outside of the passport office. These lines have moved within and because of a simple adjustment that was made following public outcry over the hassles involved in applying for a passport.
Following complaints that persons, particularly from rural areas, were being forced to leave their homes from as early as 3 am just to be able to get to the passport office in time before the quota of applicants are exhausted. The lines have disappeared from outside of the passport office. This is because instead of opening the doors at 8 am, the doors are now opened earlier, way earlier, which means that the lines have simply been shifted inside.
There have been other improvements. There are now more cashiers involved, which speeds up the process and there are also additional cubicles assigned for taking your photographs. But the waiting is way too long and there are other areas which can be improved.
The Commissioner of Police is someone that is keen on improving the service provided and should consider additional changes to help achieve this goal.  He should be commended for the improvements that have taken place but should attempt to ensure that the system gets better.
Firstly, there is no longer any need for the majority of applicants to arrive at the passport office before 8.00 am. If a way can be found to space out these arrivals, it will mean that everyone can spend much less time than before and avoid the frustration which forces many of say negative things about the ruling administration. The passport office should issue another advisory indicating that applicants are received throughout the day and therefore there is no need for the mad rush in the mornings since you can arrive at the passport office at 12.00 midday and still be able to hand in your applications.
The process of receiving the applications should also be rationalized. There are three steps involved in submitting your application. Firstly there is a brief perusal of documents at the door before an applicant enters the building. With a faster and more efficient system in place, this step can be eliminated. In any event, all it will take is a survey to establish that perhaps more than 95% of applicants do not have problems with their documents.
Applicants are then placed to sit on a bench inside and to then approach the cashier where their documents are perused and the fees paid for the new passport. The wait here is a few hours even with at times five cashiers.
Having handed in your applications and paid the required fees, the applicant is put to sit again on a bench or on a chair and have to wait again a few hours before being sent into an inner office where there is another line of chairs and another wait of about three quarters of an hour before being directed to a cubicle where your picture will be taken and other details attended to. This latter process takes about fifteen minutes.
If the passport office can be reconfigured so that the cashier and photography aspects can be collapsed into one, the waiting times can be reduced significantly but only if the number of cashiers are increased to about ten so that ten persons can simultaneously have their documents checked and their photographs taken.
Waiting times can be slashed tremendously if instead of three stages, there is only one stage with one person handling the checking, receiving of fees and the taking of photographs. But this will also involve spreading out the times at which applicants arrive. Once the system works, there will be less a tendency for persons to feel that they must arrive before 8.am.
What should happen is that the entire passport office should be redesigned, such as what takes place in banks, whereby there is one lane and numerous tellers. An applicant would arrive and would be directed to an Immigration teller who would take the application, receive the fees and take the photograph. But there must be no less than ten tellers working at the same time with functioning cameras.
In order to better improve the service, the distribution of passports should also be done from an adjoining building thereby avoiding a situation where persons submitting their applications and those waiting to receive their completed passports are crowded into the same office. This will be easier for the staff and reduce the stress and uncalled for incidents whereby members of the public are subject to harsh words.

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