PESHAWAR, Oct 13: The regional passport office in the capital city is understaffed and short of facilities to the misery of visitors from Peshawar, Charsadda and Nowshera districts and Khyber Agency.

According to a member of the staff at the office, around 500 people turn up daily to apply for passports and the number jumps to around 800 during Hajj season.

He told Dawn on Saturday that the staff already overburdened with work struggled to process fresh applications for passports timely.

The official said that the passport office contributed around Rs40 million collected as passport fee to the kitty every month.

Visitors, especially women and elderly people, complain of being stressed out at the facility by long delay in issuance of passports.

They said that the passport office was short of staff and lacked facilities.

Some women said that a special counter for photographing them was used by men, too, to their misery.

They said that another counter had been established for them but it was poorly equipped.

Ameerzada, a resident of Akora Khattak area in Nowshera district, said that he had been waiting in a queue for three hours for his turn to get a taken.

“Once you get a token, you have to wait for another two to three hours to get your application for passport processed,” he said.

Another applicant, Qaisar Khan from Charsadda, said that he deposited fee for passport a day ago thinking he would get a token earlier next morning, but the next day, a long queue welcomed him.

“It seems I’ll have to stay put until sunset,” he said.

A member of the staff said that there was a need for establishing passport offices in Charsadda and Nowshera districts to ease burden of work on the regional passport office in Peshawar.

He said that several branches of the passport office had been established in different parts of the province and Fata over a period of time.

The official said the regional passport office had made no fresh recruitment in five years but workload had increased manifold.

According to him, junior officials are appointed to senior posts due to shortage of staff.

When contacted, deputy director of the regional passport office Mian Aurangzeb Khan said that a request had formally been made to the interior ministry for provision of staff and equipment to ease the problems of the visitors.