The Post Office Passport Seva Kendra (POPSK) at the head post office in Berhampur is set to double its daily appointment slots from 50 to 100, following a proposal tabled by the Berhampur Circle's Postmaster General, Vinod Kumar, during a joint review meeting this week. The regional passport officer in Bhubaneswar, Prem Singh, reportedly agreed to the proposal - a move that would significantly ease a bottleneck affecting applicants across multiple districts in Odisha and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh.
A Centre Stretched Beyond Its Original Capacity
The Berhampur POPSK currently processes 40 passport applications and 10 police clearance certificates each day. On the surface, those figures appear modest. In practice, the centre serves a catchment area far broader than Ganjam district alone - drawing applicants from Gajapati, Khurda, and Puri in Odisha, as well as Srikakulam across the border in Andhra Pradesh. That geographic spread has created a persistent backlog: applicants are currently waiting 10 to 15 days simply to secure a verification slot.
For citizens in southern Odisha, the Berhampur POPSK is the most accessible facility available. The nearest full-service alternative - the regional passport office in Bhubaneswar - is roughly 170 kilometres away. The distance imposes real costs in time, money, and lost working days, particularly for applicants from rural and semi-urban areas who cannot easily absorb those burdens. Doubling the daily slots would not resolve all structural pressure on the centre, but it would meaningfully reduce the waiting period that applicants currently face.
The Case for a Full-Service Upgrade
Berhampur MP Pradeep Kumar Panigrahy has escalated the issue beyond administrative scheduling, formally urging the Union Ministry of External Affairs to upgrade the POPSK into a full-fledged Passport Seva Kendra (PSK) with Tatkal facilities. At present, Tatkal - the expedited passport processing service for applicants with urgent travel requirements - is available exclusively at the Bhubaneswar regional office. Residents of southern Odisha who need urgent documentation have no local recourse.
This matters because Tatkal is not a luxury tier of service but a practical necessity for a significant subset of applicants: those facing medical emergencies abroad, imminent employment obligations, or urgent family circumstances. When that facility is concentrated at a single regional hub, it effectively concentrates access along geographic and economic lines. Citizens with the means to travel to Bhubaneswar and absorb associated costs can access it; others cannot. A PSK in Berhampur with Tatkal capability would address that disparity directly.
The MP has also demanded a Passport Seva Kendra at Paralakhemundi in Gajapati district - a proposal that reflects the administrative reality that passport services in the region remain centralised in ways that do not match the actual distribution of the population they serve.
Infrastructure as a Condition for Expansion
Postmaster General Vinod Kumar has committed to providing the necessary infrastructural facilities for applicants travelling from distant areas to the Berhampur centre. While the specific nature of those provisions has not been publicly detailed, the commitment signals an awareness that simply increasing appointment numbers without attending to the physical environment of the facility risks creating a different set of problems - overcrowding, longer on-site waits, and inadequate facilities for applicants who travel considerable distances to attend.
Passport verification centres in India operate under a framework jointly managed by the Ministry of External Affairs and the Department of Posts. The POPSK model was introduced specifically to extend passport services to smaller cities and underserved areas, reducing pressure on regional passport offices. Berhampur's situation - where one POPSK is fielding demand from several districts across two states - illustrates both the success of that model and its limitations when scaling is not matched to actual demand.
What Comes Next
The agreement reached at the joint review meeting is a proposal, not yet an implemented policy. The increase in slots and any infrastructure changes will require administrative follow-through from both the postal and passport office authorities. The path from agreement to operational change in government services can be uneven, and applicants in the region will be watching closely.
If the doubling of slots is formalised and the POPSK is ultimately upgraded to a PSK with Tatkal services, it would represent a meaningful improvement in public service delivery for one of Odisha's more underserved regions. The demand is clearly there. The question now is whether the administrative momentum from this week's meeting translates into timely action.
