A Pakistani passport is a document that allows Pakistani citizens to travel internationally. It's issued by the Directorate General of Immigration & Passports (DGIP). Passport is the only document that confirms the identity of the citizen abroad of the Republic of Pakistan, as well as, realizes his/her right to exit from the country and entry into the country. Passports printed at NSPC are in conformity with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards.
In 2004, manual passport were upgraded to modern Machine Readable Passport (MRP). The MRP contains a special machine-readable zone (MRZ) at the bottom of the identity page. The data in MRZ is encoded in optical character recognition format. This allows automated verification of the passport's authenticity for faster processing of arriving passengers by immigration officials, and greater accuracy than manually-read passports, as well as faster data entry.
The e-Passport is a highly secure travel document. It has an electronic chip embedded in one of the passport pages, which will be used to store biometric information about the holder. The chip contains data that will verify the passport holder’s identity and will include the biometrics of the passport holder, the personal data found on the data page of the passport, a unique identification number and a digital signature. An e-passport has a contactless (NFC) chip on it which means that those passports can be read electronically. The newly launched e-Passports in Pakistan are in compliance with the ICAO standards.
