First passport office in Noida to be operational today

Noida: In a major relief to the residents of Noida, the first passport office of the city is all set to be operational from Wednesday. Union Minister of state of culture, environment, forest and climate change, Dr Mahesh Sharma will inaugurate the new facility which has been set up at the head post office in sector 19 of Noida.

Informing on the same, Rakesh Raina, Public relationship officer at Noida's sector 19 post office, said that the new passport office will be inaugurated on Wednesday morning at 10 am.

"The new passport office is all set to be operational from Wednesday morning. We have done live testing of all the technical processes and soon after inauguration, we will begin taking appointments of applicants for issuing passport. The new office will work from 9:30 to 5:30 daily and will take up to hundred applications daily. However, initially the passport office will only cater to the residents of Noida but is expected to be soon expanded to the whole of Gautam Buddh Nagar," said Raina.

The new development comes under the scheme of utilising all the head post offices as post office passport seva kendra (POPSK). Under the scheme, it was said that POPSK will be there at all the constituencies which are 50 km away from the nearest

passport office.

Currently, the regional passport office in Ghaziabad is the only centre for all passport-related services for Gautam Budh Nagar residents. The new passport office is also expected to relive the load from the current regional passport office and will also benefit the residents as they do not have to travel to another city for their passport related formalities.

Meanwhile, the residents of Noida welcomed the new facility and said that it is a good initiative by the government.

"The new passport office in the city will benefit the residents as they do not have to travel to another city which is time consuming and also one needs to spare whole day to get all the formalities done. Also if a person is short of some documents at the time of application, they can easily get it from their home within no time," said Anand Shrivastava, a resident of sector 19 in Noida.