Editorial»
Seal the deal
AUG 24 -
With Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal giving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) the go-ahead to sign the Machine Readable Passport (MRP) deal with Oberthur Technologies of France, the MRP issue which has been in controversy for nearly a year, we hope is close to a settlement. Back in January the government decided to cancel the global bidding process for MRP. Then in March, it decided to award MRP printing rights to India. The deal fell through in April after intense pressure from the main opposition, UCPN (Maoist), and repeated requests from the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC). Serious concerns were raised against the decision to award the contract to an Indian government undertaking. Initially, Prime Minister Nepal justified awarding the contract for “political reasons, diplomatic relations with India and time constraint.”
It is ironic that the process being expedited back in April has still not been completed. We certainly hope the deal, as widely expected, can be done and dusted with in the next few days. Far too much time has already been wasted. First of all, the contract should never have gone to a neighbouring country. It is an established international practice not to award contracts of a sensitive nature like printing of passports to immediate neighbours for security reasons. As we said at the time, the government was right to cancel the India contract. A new process was rightly initiated and Oberthur was picked in July. But various hurdles have been placed in the way of the final signing.
Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala gives us to believe that she has been against the Oberthur contract from the start. But she remained silent for a long time before coming out in the media against officials from her own ministry for “keeping her in the dark” about the passport negotiations. She went public, rather belatedly, that the French company is incapable of meeting the international standards for MRP. In recent days, she has also expressed serious objection to the “encroachment of her jurisdiction.” Whatever her objections to the Oberthur contract, it is about time the curtain is brought down on this long drawn out process. Either Prime Minister Nepal (and his foreign minister) ought to furnish valid reasons for holding up the contract and explain how it compromises the country’s interests, or the prime minister should seal the deal with Oberthur. Nepal has already missed the first deadline (April 1) of the International Civil Aviation Organisation for MRP issuance. It must make sure it meets the revised deadline of Dec. 31. This is important for a couple of reasons. The issue of MRP is directly related to Nepal’s international image. Equally important, the country’s failure to meet the new deadline will cause considerable hassles for Nepalis wanting to travel abroad. Like Foreign Minister Koirala, Prime Minister Nepal has been rather vague about his position on MRP. It’s time he made a clear policy decision and stuck to it with the determination any national leader would be expected to demonstrate on an issue of national security concern.
Posted on: 2010-08-25 08:14
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