A parliamentary committee on Sunday dismissed another panel's recommendations for dropping the Machine Readable Passport project suggesting that the government should go ahead with the project.

‘There is no reason for the government to drop the Machine Readable Passport project at the moment,' Abdus Salam, the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on the home ministry, said rejecting a suggestion by the committee on planning ministry, headed by an opposition lawmaker, that the government should not waste money [on MRP] as the country must comply with e-passport by 2014.

'The Machine Readable Passport scheme, if implemented, will be sheer waste of public money since we have to go for e-passport by 2014,' the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on planning ministry, Oli Ahmed, also a lawmaker of the Liberal Democratic Party, had told reporters after a meeting of the committee on October 29. He also had asked the planning ministry to tell the home and foreign ministries to stop the tender process and take up the scheme for e-passports in order to follow the rules set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

As per the organisation's decision, the citizens of its member countries must have machine readable passports by 2010 and e-passports by 2014 on security grounds. Reviewing the scheme, Sunday's meeting resolved that the government should stick to its position to prepare MRPs, international bidding for which have already been floated. Earlier, the government approved a project worth about Tk 283 crore for machine readable passports and machine readable visas, which are already in use in many countries. Contradicting the planning committee's suggestion, Salam, also a ruling Awami League lawmaker, said that going for e-passport after the citizens have machine readable passports would not be so costly.

-New Age