A passport to infamy

The recent smuggling of children to United States by procuring fake passports and thereafter getting the US visa stamped, exposes the loopholes in the procedures of passport department and US consulate. It also raises the question: What if terrorists had used the same modus operandi to operate across the globe? The arrest of terrorists in Bengaluru last month, makes the question more pertinent. Bellie Thomas explores the scam to find out the gaping holes and the solutions thereafter.

The racket to smuggle children from India and reunite them with their biological parents living illegally in the USA, busted recently, has revealed how easy it is to hoodwink both consulate and passport authorities. As many as 30 Gujarati and Punjabi children got past the immigration authorities on false passports in the company of couples posing as their parents to make their way to their real parents in the USA.

The ease with which the operation was carried out from Bengaluru has alarmed the authorities as it clearly shows the country is not insulated against terrorists trying to either enter or leave it using similar tactics. Passport officers now promise to run a fine comb through their processes for issuing passports to see where they could have gone wrong.

“The racketeers followed all the requisite formalities and specifications required for a family travelling abroad on visa. The 30 children who were smuggled to the US from Bengaluru gave no reason for suspicion,” said a senior official of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) looking into the racket.

The children had ticks on all the requirements such as consent of both parents, documentary proof of present address in the name of the parent(s), original and self-attested copies of parents’ passports and so on.

“Neither the passport nor the consulate authorities can be blamed for this fraud as they have put out a list of acceptable documents for  proof of address and proof of date of birth and if these documents are presented and verified by the police,  how can they be blamed?” asks a senior police officer.

For proof of address, the passport office accepts quite a few documents including a water, telephone or electricity bill,  Income Tax Assessment Order, Election Commission photo ID card, gas card, certificate from employer of a reputed company, an Aadhaar card and so on.

For proof of birth it accepts either a birth certificate issued by a municipal authority or any office authorised to issue birth and death certificates, a school leaving certificate,or an affidavit sworn before a magistrate or notary. “While most of these documents can be easily obtained through fraudulent means,  their authenticity is always verified, which suggests that the entire verification process needs to be revisited and revamped,” adds the senior official.

Airport authorities in Bengaluru not alert?
The racketeers chose Bengaluru for their operation to smuggle the children as the airport authorities of other metro cities were alert to it, according to Special Investigation Team (SIT) sources. The smugglers took care to ensure that the couple which acted as ‘carriers’ of these children knew to read, write and speak English. An official from the United States Consulate in Chennai has now come to the city to help the police with their investigations. Police from Bengaluru too could travel to the United States to learn more about the racket.

‘From Chhota Rajan to TV anchors: Passport scam not new in city’

Bengaluru is not new to scams involving fake passports. In 2013 six senior government officers were indicted by the Karnataka Lokayukta for taking bribes for verification of passports. Over a  1,000 passport applications were cleared in five months on the basis of such false verification. Senior officers including a DGP-rank police officer and a retired IAS officer took bribes of up to Rs 16,000 each to verify a passport, according to the Lokayukta.

A popular television anchor’s involvement in a fake passport racket was suspected in March 2013 when reporters of the  same news channel did a sting operation to expose issue of a passport to a terror suspect. Two journalists, (a reporter and a video-journalist) carried out the sting on receiving information about persons selling fake passports for lakhs of rupees. But even before the footage was aired, they began receiving threat calls and filed a police complaint. The police on investigation found that an anchor from the channel had tipped off the racketeers and took him in for questioning.

In another incident, three retired passport officials found themselves in the dock after the Central Bureau of Investigation found that underworld don, Chhota Rajan had managed to get a passport in the city in 2013 using a a false name and residential address. The don, who got the passport posing as Mohan Kumar from Mandya, used it to flee to Australia. He was still carrying the fake passport when he was recently arrested in Indonesia.

Q&A with P.S. Karthigeyan, Regional Passport Officer

Have you been informed about the smuggling of over 30 children to the United States?
A: It has not come to our notice officially. None of the other agencies have contacted us or shared the details with us. What I know is from the media.

Is it possible to make the system foolproof to make sure that such scams don't take place?
A: If we make the process tighter, no parents will be able to get passports for their children. The issue is how to take care of the genuine requirements of a great majority of people and also make sure that such crooks don’t get away with cheating the system. We have to ensure a balance. And this we always do, even in terms of police verification. The more we liberalise, the more there is a chance that some crook might try to cheat the system. But that does not mean we should not help the great majority who are law abiding citizens and need passports genuinely.

How does the ministry deal with such racketeers?
A: There are lots of genuine people and parents who have issues and difficulties in getting passports for their children. So when we come up with our guidelines, or revise our rules and questions, we basically look at balancing our obligation to meeting the genuine requirements of such people with the need to take precautions against those who might try and cheat the system. What the ministry is doing here is maintaining a fine balance between the integrity of the system and meeting the genuine requirements of the law-abiding citizens.

Do you think liberalisation of procedures for minor passport applicants has led to this scam?
A: This is a dynamic set-up and we keep doing this all the time. We recently liberalised the procedures for applications for minors by a single parent. Logically speaking, every time we liberalise any process, it could become more prone to misuse. But we cannot go by isolated incidents and shut down the system to make it 100 per cent foolproof. By doing that we will be denying service to a huge number of genuine people.

But what if such liberalisation helps children sneak abroad with fake parents?
A: Previously single parents could apply for a passport for minor children only through an affidavit filed before a judicial magistrate. But this made things very difficult for them. In fact, we received a lot of feedback that magistrates were reluctant to allow them to get a passport for their children. So the ministry liberalised the procedure and  allowed them to also get it from an executive magistrate  who could be a revenue officer like a Tahsildar and above. And then there was the rule that both  parents should have each other’s endorsements on their passports for minors to be able to get theirs and both parents should be physically present for the application to be processed. But this was very difficult for working couples  living in different places. So the process was liberalized. We cannot go back on this. But we will try to see how best we can make the process robust and more foolproof.

Do you think the consulates can do something to put a stop to such scams?
A: This is completely out of our domain. I cannot comment on this. It’s a sovereign right of every country to give visas or not. They will learn lessons from this and probably devise a better solution.