Integration of telecommunication in passport making process- a pseudo means to reduce travel demand and other sufferings

Abstract

Telecommunication or Information Communication Technologies (ICT) that is changing rapidly every aspects of life, is also bringing significant changes in the traditional concept of transportation. Like other telecom enabled services (1), telecom enabled passport making process has the potential to reduce significant travel demand and associated sufferings of the clients, hence of the society. On this consideration, existing passport making, renewal, amendment processes have been critically analyzed in this paper to identify the amount and pattern of physical trips and associated sufferings involved in these processes as well as to explore the way of how telecommunication or ICT can gainfully be integrated with the system. The analysis found that for the purpose of passport making, renewal and amendment process daily approximately 18,000 trips are made around Dhaka passport office. Most of these trips are made during the peak periods availing the highly congested city transport network spending huge amount of fuel, time, money and labor. It is further estimated that effective integration of ICT in the existing system can reduce or convert 63-75 percent physical trips to Fuel Free (FF) electronic trips. In addition, ICT enabled system can also speed up and simplify the process, minimize massive paper works and corruptions, ease up the social sufferings, and increase the productivity of the system. It is expected that this study would help the transport planners and policy makers‟ better way of understanding how the ICT can reduce the need for travel demand in different fields and thereby solve local traffic induced problems.