It is astonishing that the Department of Immigration and Passports (DIP) has not issued any new passports in the last four weeks. The server had run out of its capacity in June. Such a state of affairs is incomprehensible in a department which plays a crucial part in the lives of overseas travellers and for expatriate workers in particular. Tens of thousands of migrant workers risk losing their jobs or becoming undocumented unless their passports are renewed in time. Perhaps it will not be wrong to suggest that the matter was not taken seriously enough, and that the situation of our workers abroad and the threat they face as a result of this delay merited little importance in the planning of the relevant officials.

There is little comfort in the assurance of the director of the DIP that steps have already been taken to upgrade the server and that the contract with the Malaysian company concerned will be extended. It is evident that the contract with the Malaysian company had not been extended in time, and this is what begs the question: why not? When it is known that the server has a particular capacity, one would have thought that those in charge of supply chain management at the DIP would have already done their calculations to ensure an upgraded system was in place and that all the paperwork was done well before the server eventually ran out of its capacity in June. But this was not done.

While we acknowledge that the pandemic has put additional pressure on the central server, should such logistical issues not have been factored in by the planners well before June?

Although the DIP gave no timeframe for fixing this issue beyond saying "soonest", we must ask: when exactly will the system be upgraded? And when will the applicants get new passports in their hands? We would also like to know whose fault it was in the first place that proper action was not taken for the timely upgradation of the system. Why have the passport authorities been sitting on this matter since June, and why hasn't the contract with the vendor been finalised yet? After all, in spite of the travel restrictions placed due to the pandemic, travel documents are still important for various other reasons, including for Covid-19 vaccine registration, and especially for our expatriate workers who contribute the most to our foreign exchange exchequer.