Booking an Passport Appointment with new Online System of Indian Passport Office

I was trying to book an appointment for passport document submission for my sister and it was such an exciting process one has to complete with lot of perseverance and also involves a significant amount of luck factor. I thought why not share my experience.

So as a part of background, Indian passport application system has moved significant part of the application to online. Previously, I remember, when I applied for my passport in 2005, I filled one hard copy of the form and got it submitted at the local post office. Post office then verified my documents and sent the application to the passport office. I thought this process was much easier. Now one has to complete the application online and submit it to generate a file number and then comes the most complicated part, booking an appointment for getting the documents verified at designated Passport Sewa Kendra (PSK).

In this case I completed the online form for my sister on December 31, 2012 and asked her to book an appointment since the system was showing that I could only book an appointment starting January 2, 2013 after 4:00 PM. I thought may be because the year is changing they have closed the appointment system. Fifteen days later when I asked my sister again, she told me that she has been trying daily for the appointment and every time she starts the process she gets stuck due to internet problem or website being slow. I thought she might be busy in the office and must not be logging in advance.

This was the time I started trying for booking passport appointment. I live in US so I am almost 11:30 hours apart, I got up at 4:15 AM my time next day which is 3:45 PM in India to try for the 4:00 PM (IST) appointment opening slot. To my surprise, even with the good internet speed, I could not reach the appointments page until 4:00 PM (IST) and when I reached about 4-5 mins after 4, the slots were gone and system started showing the same error message to try again tomorrow.

Finally after a week of getting up early in the morning to schedule her appointment, I could get one today. Here are a few of my lessons I learnt in the process, which can make it easier for one to get the highly sought appointment:

1. When you login to the website and reach the passport appointment booking page, select the PSK from drop down menu (usually only one choice is available) enter the CAPTCHA word and hit submit, two things might happen: first, which is highly likely is that the error will show up at the top of the page asking you that appointments for today are over, check back on dd.mm.yyyy (some date) after 4:00 PM (time varies for PSKs), alternatively you might get a list of time slots below on the same page.
2. If you are lucky and you get the list of time slots on this page, you will see there are several time slots of 15 mins each, you click on one of those time slots and next confirmation page loads.
3. On the next page again enter the captcha word and click submit this will confirm your appointment.

Now, this overall seems to be a very easy and straight forward process but to get this done I spent almost a week. Here are a few tricks to successfully book the appointment:

1. Login to the website and reach the passport appointment booking page at least 10 min before the slot opening time 4:00 PM in my case.
2. Before 4:00 PM, every 2 -3 mins enter the captcha word and click submit, just to make sure that your session is not terminated.
3. Keep a track of the time which is also displayed at the top left of website, this is more reliable than your computer clock.
4. At least 1 minute before the 4:00 PM deadline do not submit the page anymore, otherwise you might hist the rush hour. Expect website getting busy at sharp 4:00 PM.
5. Do a mental countdown or a stopwatch in your cell phone after your last reload, beyond the time you saw in the clock on website. For instance your last page was reloaded at 3:58:45 PM you have 1 minute 15 seconds in 4:00 PM, track this time in stopwatch and be ready to submit the form with captcha word entered.
6. Hit submit exactly 2-3 seconds before 4:00 PM and you are highly likely to see time slots below.
7. Try to choose a time slot towards the mid or end of the day, which many people might not be selecting and go to the confirmation page.
8. Another catch is that, sometimes they change the availability date before opening the slots. So you might see that the error message will say “sorry you missed today and come back on a later date, appointments for today are full”. If you see that it is still just 4-5 seconds past 4:00 PM then don’t be disheartened. It is a lucky offer, try again, it is highly unlikely that all the slots will get full in 5 seconds. You will see that slots are loaded even though that error showed up last time.
9. Many people will just leave when they will see the error, but I got an appointment even after seeing that error, since the watch was still showing 4:00:05 PM I tried again.
10. These are more or less all the tricks you will need and a bit of luck to get the appointment, but still if you couldn’t drop me a comment with your mail id. I will share the last resort which could be helpful.

Have you ever seen a more complicated challenge, this whole article has to be implemented in a matter of 10-20 seconds.

All the best and happy passport appointment booking!!!