Abstract:
Telecommunication or Information Communication Technologies (ICT) that is changing rapidly every aspects of life, is
also bringing significant changes in the traditional concept of transportation. Like other telecom enabled services (1),
telecom enabled passport making process has the potential to reduce significant travel demand and associated sufferings
of the clients, hence of the society. On this consideration, existing passport making, renewal, amendment processes have
been critically analyzed in this paper to identify the amount and pattern of physical trips and associated sufferings
involved in these processes as well as to explore the way of how telecommunication or ICT can gainfully be integrated
with the system. The analysis found that for the purpose of passport making, renewal and amendement process daily
approximately 18,000 trips are made around Dhaka passport office. Most of these trips are made during the peak periods
availing the highly congested city transport network spending huge amount of fuel, time, money and labor. It is further
estimated that effective integration of ICT in the existing system can reduce or convert 63-75 percent physical trips to
Fuel Free (FF) electronic trips. In addition, ICT enabled system can also speed up and simplify the process, minimize
massive paper works and corruptions, ease up the social sufferings, and increase the productivity of the system. It is
expected that this study would help the transport planners and policy makers’ better way of understanding how the ICT
can reduce the need for travel demand in different fields and thereby solve local traffic induced problems.
