500 fake passports seized in Madurai

This was revealed by the Regional Passport Officer (RPO) Maniswara Raja on Thursday to the media persons. “Passports had to be reissued after its expiry date to those who fulfil three criteria under the ECNR scheme. The persons must have paid Income Tax or should have completed SSLC or should have worked in a foreign country at least for three years,” the official explained. 

However, many blue collar workers who did not satisfy either of the three criteria had obtained passports by misusing the ECNR scheme. “Those who did not earn enough have voluntarily paid Income Tax and had obtained IT returns through agents just to obtain or renew passports,” Maniswara Raja said. 

Earlier, there were no verification procedures involved for reissuing a passport and hence they had obtained passports easily. But after the verification process was included for reissuing of passports the officials started a through verification and in the last seven months they found nearly 500 people have misused the ECNR scheme.

During the verification process the passport officials had checked the bank accounts and the salary slips and found out that the records submitted by them do not match with the original records. They had obtained passports with fake records in Madurai jurisdiction which also cover Tirunelveli office. 

The officials promptly issued notices to them and impounded their passports. Most of the fake passports were obtained by the people from Rameswaram and Kanniyakumari districts. The RPO said that when the fake passport holders were inquired, they said that they were misled by the agents, who took huge amount of money from the applicants to arrange for fake IT returns.