Slightly damaged passport, please advise...

[aptelugu]

I am on an F1 visa right now and my EAD of one year is starting in Feb '05 although I will get my MS in May '05. Last summer I went to India and all went well till I was in the Begumpet airport on the way back where the sub-inspector at the emigration check who checks the passports ran my passport through the machine thrice and said that it wasn't detecting it on the photo lamination side.

He looked at the US visa and then entered the passport no. thru their online database and found that all the info matched perfectly along with name,photo, address and said to me 'the passport seems to have been damaged' but allowed me to go through. I did not have any problems at the port of entry or anywhere else while coming back to dallas, since the visa info was all right and visually the passport is pretty good. There is just a slight discolouration of the passport there, apart from that there is no problem at all but it failed the machine scan.

I was wondering if this would cause a problem at the canadian or mexico consulate if I go for stamping for H1B in this year although they will have all the visa info/photo/fingerprints etc perfectly. Do the consulates do the machine scanning? I am thinking of applying and getting a duplicate passport from a consulate(in houston via mail) here since I cannot go back to India for this during my EAD. Does anyone have any idea how much time this will take? Since I have to attach the damaged passport along with the application for the duplicate passport, I will be without the passport/visa/I-94 while its in processing. Also, since i will travelling during this period, I need to have my passport with me. Has anyone gone through this process? Can you please enlighten me on this. Thank you friends.

Edit: This is to clarify that I hold an Indian passport. Also, in case of damaged passports, is a duplicate passport pinned along with the original, or is the old one destroyed.

 

[Kanadian]

agree, I had this situation once and I had to do the same thing as Joe mentioned in this note.

 

[Karlshammar]

JoeF's right, as usual.

Also, many countries will, if you tell them that you are planning to travel soon, allow you to instead bring in the passport for copying (or send them notarized copies) and keep it while they process your new one. You would then have to bring in your old one when you pick up the new one, and they will invalidate the old one and then give it back to you with the visa, et cetera.

However, this is different from country to country, just like passport renewal processing times, and since I'm not Indian I don't have a clue. Ask your passport agency/consular post if they will accept this alternative and how long the processing will be.

I don't know the procedure of getting a new Indian passport, since I'm not Indian, but make sure that you get the old one back, just invalidated. The visa in the passport stays valid, and you would just show both the old passport with the visa and the new passport when traveling.