If you want to avoid being at Toronto Pakistani embassy at 8:30AM in freezing cold and don’t want to face attitude of weird personnel and wait during their 2 hour lunch break. NOW you can now apply for renewal of your passport on http://onlinemrp.dgip.gov.pk/ if you are abroad and your passport has or is expiring soon. But before even thinking about that make sure you have a very specific set of experience and tools that may include a stamp pad, scanner, printer, above average Photoshop and computer skills and a lot of patience!
There are 10 steps, the very first step after signing in is $$$$. You can’t move forward without paying the fee and this fee is non-refundable and non-any-able, no questions asked. So if you are unable to complete the application or they don’t like your finger prints or photo or there is anything wrong, you money is gone. So be well-prepared! Also, it’s a lot of money as compared to what you will pay in Pakistan for passport renewal.
Second biggest issue is uploading the photo, the have set requirements about dimensions of the picture in cmxcm and DPIs but since computers read in pixels, you’re going to have a difficult time uploading the picture. I had my photo taken from a professional photographer, scanned at 600 DPI and saved under 2MB but it didn’t go through because of a very very UNEXPECTED error message.
Eyes cannot be detected.
After trying a few dozen times with a lot of different re-sizes of the photo, I was helpless and was regretting why I was stupid to trust the system and paid in the first step. After looking at odd Pakistani forums, I found a YouTube video where a nice guy was complaining about how the process of applying a NICOP online is madness but he did mention a online tool where you can upload a picture and set the final filesize and dimensions because if requirement says under 5MB, it can’t be 700KB, it has to be on the heavier side. Anyway, I made my face bigger in photoshop, resaved it using the online photo converter tools and finally it was approved.
Tip: Make sure to remove properties and personal details from the images you are uploading. So it doesn’t say Photoshop or any software name you used to edit it out.
Other 6 steps were just filling in the information about travel history, address and all but the horror step I was not so hot about was the finger print scanning. Initially I had a hard time finding the finger print form on the website, it only comes up ON that specific step but I did find it somewhere online and they wanted crisp and clear finger prints of ALL frickin fingers. Once on the finger print step, the system went all smart and gave me a document with my first and last name printed and requesting for only 4 finger prints! Very happy to hear but the stamp pad I had was giving all smudgy results and ink was all over the place. After trying and testing at least a 100 finger prints, I was able to cherry pick the best, scan them and blend them together in Photoshop in the scanned form. Put my name in CAPS (It was all in lower-case), upload back and rejected! Back to filesizes and DPIs etc, figured it out sooner than later this time based on experience with Photo uploading. Hence, success there!
Other documents required were, scanned CNIC copy, scanned old passport first and second page and for some reason a random page number 9 was required, which I did even though it had nothing on it. Last step was review of everything (which was un-editable at this point) and had a final submit button, which when clicked, refreshed the website, almost logged me out, I don’t even remember where everything went.
Thankfully, I got an email after 2 days that my application was accepted and underway of processing. The processing time on website for urgent passport was 4 days! I was not exited by that as I knew it’ll be at least 2 weeks BUT..
Passport was shipped in 3 days from Islamabad!
How cool! That sort of helped me forgive and forget the painful experience of applying it in the first place. Tracked DHL shipment for next 4 days and after bring in 5 different countries, the delivery person rang my doorbell at 2pm.
Good news! I have the passport in under 10 days and I do appreciate the government is actually working on easier solutions for people. The thing and point they are missing is that these in-house developers who are building these hard to use products will crazy UX and UI are incapable of testing it with real people. A common person wants these solutions to actually be able to use them.
Better user experience and user interface are ESSENTIAL for human happiness.
Ciao!
