The Department of Passport is a government agency of

Nepal Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mainly situated in the Himalayas, but also includes parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China Ch ...

assigned with the responsibilities of issuing

Passports A passport is an official travel document issued by a government that certifies a person's identity and nationality for international travel. A passport allows its bearer to enter and temporarily reside in a foreign country, access local aid ...

to the

ese citizens and Travel Documents to the legally applicable persons under

Ministry of Foreign Affairs In many countries, the ministry of foreign affairs (abbreviated as MFA or MOFA) is the highest government department exclusively or primarily responsible for the state's foreign policy and relations, diplomacy, bilateral, and multilateral r ...

History

Until 31 March 2010, Nepal still issued hand-written Passports. However, as a member of

International Civil Aviation Organization The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO ) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates the principles and techniques of international air navigation, and fosters the planning and development of international sch ...

, Nepal was obliged to issue

machine-readable passport A machine-readable passport (MRP) is a machine-readable travel document (MRTD) with the data on the identity page encoded in optical character recognition format. Many countries began to issue machine-readable travel documents in the 1980s. Most ...

s. The Central Passport Office stopped issuing hand-written passports on 31 March 2010 and had to be withdrawn from circulation as of November 2015. On 26 December 2010, the Office introduced machine-readable passports and issued them thereafter. As of 2021, Nepal began issuing

E-passport A biometric passport (also known as an electronic passport, e-passport or a digital passport) is a passport that has an embedded electronic microprocessor chip, which contains biometric information that can be used to authenticate the identity ...

to replace the

Machine-readable passport A machine-readable passport (MRP) is a machine-readable travel document (MRTD) with the data on the identity page encoded in optical character recognition format. Many countries began to issue machine-readable travel documents in the 1980s. Most ...

References

Government departments of Nepal Passport offices 2012 establishments in Nepal {{Nepal-gov-stub