Overview
- Since May 28, 2025, every new or renewed passport issued in India has been an e‑passport, with the overseas system going live on October 28 under GPSP V2.0.
- The MEA reports over 80 lakh e‑passports issued domestically and about 62,000 through missions abroad, reflecting six months of nationwide rollout.
- The embedded RFID chip stores digitally signed demographic and biometric data in read‑only form, activates only when machine‑read at immigration, and cannot be tracked remotely.
- All infrastructure and data are owned by the MEA across three government data centres in Noida, Chennai and Bengaluru, protected by a seven‑layer security architecture.
- Authorities issue roughly 50,000 passports daily with counter times down to about 30 minutes, existing non‑chipped passports remain valid until expiry, and the government aims for full e‑passport coverage by 2035 with no current fee increase.