You could have an e-passport by the end of this year, Thanks to TCS

Indians can expect to have chip-based e-passports by the end of the year as tech giant TCS readies its rollout as per reports. This is the second major upgrade Tata's tech behemoth will undertake for the Passports Seva Kendra (PSK).

The new Indian e-passport will be a biometric passport for citizens. The passport contains a small electronic chip that stores all the passport information including the holder’s name, nationality, and date of birth.

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Interestingly, the government issued India’s first e-passport with biometric details to former President Pratibha Patil in 2008 and has already issued about 20,000 e-passports to diplomats and other officials under a pilot project.

Globally over 100 countries already use e-passports. Malaysia became the first country to launch an e-passport in 1998, before the ICAO adopted a global blueprint for integrating biometrics into passports and other machine-readable travel documents. Belgium issued the world's first passport compliant with ICAO standards in 2004, while Bangladesh was the first South Asian nation to introduce e-passports in 2020.