First batch of documents to be issued in June

New Delhi: India's first e-passport is expected to be issued next month.

The new travel documents will be issued to diplomats and officials first - others may have to wait for about 10 months - or even more.

If all goes well, the first e-passport will be issued by June 15 to President Pratibha Patil or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - or both.

Recent trials conducted on the new documents in a US government laboratory returned such impressive results that American officials apparently remarked they would need to study the Indian technology.

An eight-member official delegation visited Washington earlier this month carrying 25 test e-passports.

The eight officials, drawn from the Ministry of External Affairs, the National Informatics Centre, the Indian Security Press (Nasik) and the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, had an appointment to keep at the inter-operability test centre in the US Department of Homeland Security.

Embedded antenna

The e-passport will have thicker front and back flaps. The rear flap bears a silicon chip smaller than a postage stamp and an embedded rectangular antenna.

During the tests, all the documents were scanned at multiple "readers" to check if they could be read smoothly.

"We found that while the American e-passport took a minimum of 10 seconds to be read, our passports took just four seconds," said a beaming Indian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

According to a member of the team, the reason for the quicker response of the chip was the software developed by IIT-Kanpur and NIC.