Ratios in regional passport office
You must remember this joke from a movie, where the comedian uses his passport instead of his ration card by mistake and an entry for 2 kg of sugar and 3 litres of kerosene gets into that. The bigger joke in real life is not being able to use the passport even for that. Most MNCs have made passport a mandatory document to be submitted on the date of joining. This helps freshers build castles in the air in a foreign location that gets destructed by a hijacked flight on the joining date when they realise that passport is just to ease the background verification process and does not promise any foreign tours.
Jokes apart let’s now dive into the data. I obtained the weekly data on passport related services from data.gov.in. The dataset contains various year till date stats on the passport application and the process across 37 regional passport offices across the country. Before computing any stats from the dataset, I wanted to visually consume how these regional passport offices are distributed across our country. An idea of doing a Voronoi plot of the regional passport offices across the country struck me. (Thanks to the current project for a bank which I am part of in my company and for the Guru who created an automated program to draw the Voronoi polygons on a map). To put in simple words Voronoi polygons are like land mafias. A city might have many land mafias and the land gets distributed among all the mafia’s based on the proximity of the distance from their head office to the land in the city and sometimes their ability to yell in a louder tone. The idea is that higher the number of mafias higher is the number of polygons and vice versa. It is a good representation to denote density of presence of a particular thing in a place or region. Having said that let’s now see how the Voronoi polygon representation of RPOs in India looks like.
looking at the Voronoi plot you can say Northern part of the country has on average one passport office per state. But when you come to the south the states are divided like the streaks on a Banyan leaf by Voronoi. Especially look at Kerala and Tamilnadu. Considering the passport offices are opened based upon demand in a particular region I am not able to guess why so many people from south want to leave the country. Oh ! Those MNCs majorly based on south demanding passport on the date of joining also could be a reason.
Now having drawn Voronoi, let’s colour it based on some of the ratios calculated from the dataset.
The number of males and females are balanced in most part of our country except for Regional passport office in Patna. Here for every ten men, only one woman has applied for a passport. Down south the ratio is largely balanced.
Getting a passport is a big deal, there is a huge process behind it. For most of us, the passport application process does not start with getting an application, but with a spelling change request in the birth certificate followed by address change requests in few proofs. This will take a time of its own considering each thing has a big process around it and by the time when everything is ready there will be water scarcity in your area forcing you to vacate the house. Then you have to start reinventing the wheel except for this time you need not change the spelling in your birth certificate. So the whole process could take up to a year (Starting from birth certificate renaming). This is for normal passport, for tatkal (15 days ) the process, even more, tougher as you have to provide additional proofs and that has to be in sync. So getting a tatkal passport requires much effort than managing to get a seat in Havard. Let’s see how the ratio of Tatkal ratio is spread across the nation.
Two of the top 3 RPO are from Kerala. Cochin (11.7%) followed by Kozhikode (11.5%). Insane numbers. The RPO where I got the passport, Coimbatore has only 0.8% of Tatkal applications out of the total. I knew it was tougher in Coimbatore before even looking at the data.
Now let’s see out of so many applications whats the percentage of graduates who are applying for a passport and colour the RPOs based on that.
In the south, the graduate percentage is around 50 except for these two RPOs Malappuram and Kozhikode. Malappuram RPO is the lowest in the country with only 10.7% of graduates among the total number of applicants. Incidentally, Malappuram also tops the list of the lowest male to female ratio in the country — 1.14%. There are almost as many female applicants as males. This got me interested in the place and I googled to find that Malappuram tops the list of the districts by number of NRIs from Kerala and a major driver of the local economy is the remittances of the migrants residing in the Middle East, by which banking sector in Malappuram has huge NRI deposits. The tatkal application ratio of Malappuram RPO is sixth in the country.
So If you are not a graduate and if you father repeatedly scolds you for not being able to prosper in life and suddenly someday you decide to apply for a tatkal passport to go to foreign, earn and become rich in a song, Malappuram is the place to be.
ShareShare Data Comics #21 — Ratios in Regional Passport Office
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ShareShare Data Comics #21 — Ratios in Regional Passport Office
