India's passport revolution: How millions of citizens got the blue book

The credit for changing the face of passport issuance goes to Manmohan Singh led United Progressive Alliance government

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj recently proclaimed that if one has an Indian passport, “it will act as a shield in any part of the world.” Contradictions or coincidences apart, till not so long ago, getting a new passport or renewing an old one or getting a lost one reissued was a nightmare of sorts -– for many it was plain harassment at the hands of everyone, from a lower-level clerk to a secretary-level bureaucrat. No wonder that a nation of a billion-plus people had just 74 million passport holders as of 2017, according to the Ministry of External Affairs