Maldives Immigration resumed issuing new passports on Sunday, 11 October, after a delayed stock of passport booklets arrived in the Maldives, and expects to clear its backlog of pending applications by the end of this week, an Immigration spokesperson said on Wednesday, 14 October.
The agency received the new stock last weekend. The spokesperson said priority was being given to applicants with more urgent travel needs, and that the suspension of passport services had left more than 2,000 applications pending. Homeland Security Minister Ali Ihusan told reporters last week that the backlog stood at 2,646 applications.
Immigration officers are working overtime to clear the backlog, the spokesperson said. "There may be a small delay as we are clearing our backlog. We have been getting messages regarding this. We expect it to get better starting around Thursday. [Officers] are working overtime to clear it," the spokesperson said.
Immigration suspended the issuance of new passports in August. Instead, it extended the validity of expiring passports to 30 June 2027 and issued emergency passports for short trips to destinations such as Sri Lanka and India. On 27 August, the agency said it would take a month for a new stock of passports to arrive; that deadline passed on 27 September, and on 6 October Immigration said it expected services to return to normal the following week.
The issuance of e-passports was also disrupted in May, when a shortage of material needed to produce them forced Immigration to suspend the service. The spokesperson did not give a firm date for when waiting times would fully return to normal, and the agency has not announced any change to the extended validity of expired passports.