Hand-written passports can stop you from coming to Oman

Muscat: Expats in Oman, who hold hand-written passports, may not be able to come back to the Sultanate after leaving the country, embassy officials have warned.
Rojina Tamrakar, Chargé d’Affaires of the Nepal Embassy in Muscat, said the Nepal government is not allowing anybody to board international flights with hand written passports anymore. “It has to be Machine Readable Passports (MRPs), which are globally acceptable,” she said.
A senior official at the Indian Embassy also confirmed that Indian citizens can’t board their flight from India with hand written passports.
The deadline set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) for member countries to replace all handwritten passports with machine readable ones ended on November 24, 2015.
Become strict
“After that we have issued the deadline several times, but now the government has become strict and is not allowing anyone to travel to international countries with hand written passports,” the official said.
Social workers say some of their community members still hold handwritten passports, but their number is very small. “We cannot say exactly how many expatriates still hold handwritten passports but I assure you that there will be very few,” said a social worker.
Social workers said expatriates holding handwritten passports should approach their respective embassies as soon as possible to obtain the machine readable passports.
“Around three to four people approach every month with handwritten passports in our embassy and we change them immediately,” an embassy official said.
This also means that non-MRP passport holders will have two options in case of emergency travel; either wait for a couple of weeks for a new passport or go to their home country and change their passports to machine readable ones as soon as possible. “So those who do have not MRP passports could have their legal status jeopardised in Oman,” a social worker added.