- Target:
- Sri Sasi Tharoor, Hon'ble Minister of State, Government of India
- Region:
- India
- Website:
- www.britishmalayali.co.uk
Dear Hon'ble Minister Sri Tharoor
At first we would like to thank you for your wonderful services to Pravasi Malayalees as the minister of external affairs. This is to invite your kind attention for an emergency matter. You may have noticed the recent coverage of Malayalam papers such as Manorama and British Malayali about the unexpected and unjustified introduction of passport surrender fees.
Recently a few Malayalees have applied for OCI card and they, in turn, received a letter from the embassy asking to submit their passport surrender certificate. In fact the embassy was holding even old applications for such a long time and now sending back with the request of submitting the passport surrender certificate. The implementation of new changes have never been announced and it has appeared only recently in the embassy website. Most unfortunate thing is that the embassy charges 90 pound per application and another undisclosed amount for each certificate. Besides these, each applicant needs to pay 165 pound for OCI application.
It means that every individual applicant needs to pay around 300 pounds for OCI card, which is about Rs.25 000. Almost all our families got two children. Therefore the total cost for a family would come to a total of 1 Lakh.
We the undersigned hereby request you to urgently intervene in this serious issue and stop the embassy to exploit the non resident Indians unnecessarily. We would like to invite your kind intervention in the following things.
• Kindly scrap the passport surrender fees and demands only allow the passport surrender certificate fees.
• Treat this as a service and therefore fix the passport surrender certificate fees legitimately.
• Kindly publish the date of the implementation of the new changes
• Kindly exempt any application already made from the proposed changes.
We hope you would understand the seriousness of the issue and would kindly interact the concerned officials for a favorable solution of the problem.
You can further help this campaign by sponsoring it
The Scrap the Passport Surrender Fees petition to Sri Sasi Tharoor, Hon'ble Minister of State, Government of India was written by britishmalayali and is in the category Government at GoPetition.