After the era of machine readable passports, Bangladeshi citizens will get long awaited e-passports from 1st July. These new e-passports will book like present machine readable passports, but there will not have two pages with personal information like present machine readable passports. Instead of that it will have polymer card with microchip. This microchip will contain passport holder’s information. There will be 38 types of security features in this new e-passport, so forgery will be very difficult. Present machine readable passport database information will be transferred to e-passport database. This data will also kept on databases around the world for verification process.
There will be two types of e-passports: with five year validity and ten year validity. Citizens under 18 years of age will get passports with five year validity and will cost 3500 taka. On the other hand matured citizens will get passport with ten year validity and will cost 5000 taka.
Passports will be delivered within 21 days. But charge for urgent delivery will be higher. Urgent passport with five year validity will cost 5,500 taka and very urgent fee will be 7,500 taka. Charge for urgent passport with ten year validity will be 7000 taka and it will be 9000 taka for very urgent passport with ten year validity.
Existing machine readable passports will also remain valid, but those will be withdrawn gradually with renewal process.
