A joint team of the Passport Department Kathmandu and the Nepali Embassy in France has arrived in Portugal to provide passport services to Nepalis in Portugal. A three-member team led by the director of the department, Moti Bahadur Sris, arrived in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to collect applications for electronic passports (e-passports).

The team has started providing services from Friday by conducting a 'Ghumti Seva Camp' at the hall of the Non-Resident Nepalese Association of Portugal in Lisbon. With the start of the service, the team leader and director of the department, Moti Bahadur Sris, informed that the Nepali service users around the camp started to gather.

On the first day on Friday, the 'biometric' details of one hundred and eighty-three people whose passports have expired, whose validity is less than one year, whose passports have been damaged or lost and who were born in Portugal, have been collected.

Since 6,000 people have filled the online application to make a new passport, it is estimated that about the same number of applications will be collected, Director Sris said. Stating that efforts are being made to provide services so as to be able to work on time, he also requested the service users to attend the specified day and time. 'Now we are working by giving priority to those who have applied in advance to make a passport. We will try to provide other emergency and urgent consular services by looking at the needs and workload,' he said.