Analyzing the Status of Improvement in Public Service Delivery through E-Government Implementation in Department of Passport, Nepal

Passport is an essential document required to travel countries other than that of residence. People travel abroad in search of employment, higher education, immigration, and refreshment and the requirement of passport is obvious. In order to issue a passport the filled form has to be sent to Department of Passport (DoP) with the verified information. The information verification is a very sensitive and lengthy process in Nepal as it is a paper based system, which is initiated and done from the local level. All the information at local level are in paper-based system as digitization of data has not been done. The DoP has implemented online pre-enrollment system to facilitate the passport application processing. The assumption is always made that the introduction of technology improves the service delivery. The research objective is to explore the online pre-enrollment system of DoP in passport processing and understand whether the system implementation has been able to generate the desired effect of improving the public service delivery to the targeted audience as a part of GoN. A mixed method approach is used to perform the research. E-Government Maturity Models (E-GovMM) and SWOT analysis are used to analyze the status of existing online pre-enrollment system and a purposive survey is done to collect the views of the officials on the use of the system. The qualitative and quantitative data are collected through observations, historical records, documentary, and online survey. The collected data are analyzed to obtain the findings which is used to understand the service provider perspective on status of public service delivery through the implementation of the e-government system. The findings from the E-GovMM and SWOT analysis showed that the maturity level of the system is in alignment with the existing status of the online pre-enrollment system, which has attained the transactional level of maturity. Despite the low level of development in telecommunication infrastructure in Nepal the citizens participate in the use of the e-government system. From the descriptive analysis of the survey with the employees of the DoP it can be deducted that - the online pre-enrollment system implementation in DoP has helped to improve the passport processing process.