The Department of Passport is a government agency of

Nepal Nepal (; ne, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne, सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mai ...

assigned with the responsibilities of issuing

Passports A passport is an official travel document issued by a government that contains a person's identity. A person with a passport can travel to and from foreign countries more easily and access consular assistance. A passport certifies the personal ...

to the Nepalese citizens and Travel Documents to the legally applicable persons under

Ministry of Foreign Affairs In many countries, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the government department responsible for the state's diplomacy, bilateral, and multilateral relations affairs as well as for providing support for a country's citizens who are abroad. The entit ...

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 sc ...

, Nepal was obliged to issue machine-readable passports. The Central Passport Office stopped issuing hand-written passports on 31 March 2010 and had to be withdrawn from circulation as of November 2015.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 e-passport or a digital passport) is a traditional passport that has an embedded electronic microprocessor chip which contains biometric information that can be used to authenticate the identity of the p ...

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. Mos ...

References

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