Recently visited the Passport Seva Kendra, or PSK as it is now called in Bengaluru. And its modern. TCS has been awarded some 1000 crores for a project to modernize and e-fy passport offices all over India. Bengaluru and Chandigarh are the two places where this project has been implemented to start with. Expectation is to have swift process for passport application which takes a lot of time thanks to erstwhile manual process of application, police verification (which remains but is swift, as claimed) etc.
So coming to the point of passport size photo, you do not need a photograph to be provided with your application while applying for a passport. They have digital cameras which capture your picture, quite hassle free. I had a similar experience at RTO bangalore where I did not have to provide a passport size photo.
This simply means that you no longer need the ubiquitous passport size photo. Well, it is still needed in some cases like when applying for loans, sim card etc but the actual meaning of the photo - 'passport' size will be soon gone.
So will the name need be changed ? Think of it some 100 years from now, will there be an entity called passport photo ? If yes, we will be there to tell tales of how the paper passport photo was taken over by digital photos.
Not to forget the fate of photo studios which survive on passport photos. They might move into other businesses or offer other services like marriage photography, etc ( A lot of them already do this along with regular passport photo business )
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