About this stamp
Fifty Years of the Passports Act
India Post issued this ₹25 stamp on 23 June 2017 for fifty years of the Passports Act, 1967, which received the President’s assent on 24 June 1967. Around 25,000 passports a year were being issued at independence, under the Indian Passports Rules of 1950. In 1966, in Satwant Singh Sawhney v. Union of India, the Supreme Court held that the right to travel abroad is part of personal liberty, which cannot be taken away except by procedure established by law; the government then made the issue of passports a matter of law, first by ordinance and then by the Passports Act.
From 9 Offices to Passport Seva
There were 9 regional passport offices in 1978, 22 by 1990 and 28 by 2000, when about 1.8 crore Indians held passports. The Tatkaal scheme came in to cut delays, computerisation began in the 1990s, and machine-readable passports replaced hand-written ones from 2001. The Passport Seva Project, run as a public–private partnership, re-engineered the whole service through a national network of about 91 Passport Seva Kendras linked with the police, immigration, India Post and missions abroad; and the Ministry of External Affairs and the Department of Posts agreed to open passport services at post offices.
The stamp was designed by Brahm Prakash; Security Printing Press, Hyderabad printed 0.5 million.
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