Aquino to receive first new e-passport to roll out Monday

President Benigno Aquino III. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MALVAR, Batangas—The country’s first ever e-passport plant located here promises to process new Philippine passports in less than a day, even minutes, giving every page of the travel document new intricate and tamper-proof designs.

President Aquino himself will witness the first live demonstration of the new e-passport system on Monday at the three-hectare, high-security printing plant at industrial park Lima Technology Center.

Aquino will experience the entire process of passport application—from enrollment and the capture of his biometrics and biographical data to printing and verification. All these will be done in a matter of minutes with APO’s personalization machine.

To demonstrate the system’s capability to conduct a similar process off-site at real time, representatives of overseas Filipino worker communities based in Singapore and Doha, Qatar, will participate in the live demonstration.

Leading the unveiling ceremony is the APO Production Unit, the government-controlled corporation under the Presidential Communications Operations Office, which has been awarded the contract to print the new e-passports for the Department of Foreign Affairs.

‘Urgency to replace system’

The event will also be attended by Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario.

“There is an urgency to replace the old system,” Jimbo Aldaba, executive vice president and general manager of APO, said during a recent visit by journalists to the plant.

He said the DFA’s Consular Affairs Office was facing severe backlogs and delays in passport processing because the system could only accommodate up to 6,000 passports a day, even less than half the average daily requirement of 15,000 passports.

“The system could no longer swallow this. Old machines and the old software were causing the problem. Most passport enrollment machines had reached the end of life,” Aldaba said.

He said that apart from doing the manual encoding, the old system still relied on software Windows XP, which is nearing its obsolescence.

The plan of the national government was to set up an integrated plant that would produce passports in one area, making passport processing faster and more efficient, he said.

Web-based application

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas used to print the passports at its security plant complex in Quezon City.

Aldaba said the Lima e-passport plant will use a global web-based application system that automatically inputs the data given by the applicants during their online appointment booking.

The information automatically goes into one system which does its own verification right away.

“When you apply for a passport, your details no longer need to be re-encoded,” he said.

APO was awarded a contract with the DFA to maintain its old system before fully transitioning to the new one.

Under the contract, the DFA has engaged APO to do maintenance and technical services to keep the servers and the communication lines between DFA headquarters and the 120 embassies, foreign-service outposts and regional consular offices which still have computers that enroll applicants running.

Aldaba said that of the 17 printers originally delivered in 2009, only three are operating.

Security and proximity

Lima Technology Center is a 485-hectare estate registered under the Philippine Economic Zone Authority located at Lipa City and Malvar, Batangas.

Aldaba said the government chose Lima Technology Center as the location for its high security printing due to its proximity to the Batangas port and Metro Manila’s road network.

The new passport printing system offers new designs that make the travel document almost impossible to fake.

Identification document

In a prototype shown to journalists, each page bore lines of the national anthem “Lupang Hinirang” in the background of pictures of the Philippines. A page is dedicated to the full text of Filipino national hero Jose Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios (My Last Farewell).”

“The passport is an identification document. What identifies us as Filipinos is the diversity of our archipelago,” he said.

The passports are made of more durable and higher-quality materials to last beyond the normal wear-and-tear.