India: A plane crash, a fake passport and a slew of questions

NEW DELHI, India — When an Air India Express flight from Dubai overshot the runway in Mangalore, India, and burst into flames, killing 158 passengers and crew, the Indian press was abuzz with stories about airline safety, the national carrier's recent troubles and its many mistakes.

But as names and passport numbers of the dead flashed on television screens across the country, another scandal was about to be exposed: That of a fake passport racket.

It has come to the attention of authorities in the country that as many as 10 passengers on that flight in May may have been using fraudulent passports for their travel. "There were various discrepancies in some of the passports of passengers," said M.K. Lokesh, India's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. "I wouldn't call it a racket, but there were some problems."

Several apparent irregularities prompted an investigation. Some of the addresses were clearly fabricated, and many of the photographs on the passports didn't match the people carrying them.

In the United Arab Emirates, 27-year-old Shavanas Mammed Koya was shocked when relatives and neighbors started calling and offering condolences.

"All my friends here got calls from my relatives in India worried that I had died. Fortunately, I had spoken to my wife in the morning, before the news of the crash emerged, so she knew I was all right," he told the National, a newspaper published from the United Arab Emirates.

Koya's passport number was listed against the name of a certain Abdul Samad, who died in the crash, but Koya had neither left the country nor had any plans to travel. He lodged a complaint with the consulate, which has confirmed that he had not left the country and was the rightful owner of the passport in question.

Koya's situation has shed light on a fairly well-established and well-known organized crime racket, the "Kasargod Embassy" in Kerala's northern district. The Embassy deals in fake and forged passports, providing them to poor workers in the Persian Gulf. The forgers manipulate the passport by replacing the photograph and stamping it with various residence and visit visas that they then sell for about $1,360.

Many employers in the United Arab Emirates sponsor and fly over their workers and then hold on to their passports as a form of security, to protect themselves from the workers fleeing to another job or another country. While illegal, the practice is widespread, and many times, workers end up never getting back their passports.

The fake passport racket then enables not only workers from India to get to the Gulf in the first place but stranded workers abroad to come back to their countries. According to local media reports, 39 of the passengers were from Kasargode in Kerala, and were likely poor migrants from the village.

Abdul Samad, who was traveling on Koya's passport had been a casual worker in Dubai for over 19 years and was on his way back home for the first time in three years.

Because of the condition of the remains and the charring of the bodies, officials are doing DNA analysis on the bodies to confirm their identities. While early newspaper reports suggested that this, along with the allegations of passport fraud, might have an impact on the compensation claims by the families, opposition leader in the Kerala assembly, Oommen Chandy told the media that as most of the victims belong to poor families, denying them the compensation "was not justifiable."

In addition to the amount sanctioned by the state and federal government, the victims will get $145,000 from Air India, according to international aviation standards.

Authorities believe that the passport fraud case connected with this incident is small potatoes compared with what's going on in the rest of the country. They claim that not only are passports being fabricated, so are visas.

Valayar Ravi, the minister of Overseas Indian Affairs, who is on an official visit to the United Arab Emirates, told local media that passport fraud was a serious and prevalent issue that had been encountered before in the region.

In a letter to the Research Directorate dated April 17, 2007, an official from the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi wrote, "… to my knowledge there are no identity documents in India that are not altered or counterfeited frequently. Even when we send them for verification we cannot be sure that the 'verifier' has not been paid to tell us the document is genuine."

The economics of the fraudulent passport business make this a desirable commodity to deal in. The maximum fine for a "minor offense" under the Indian Passport Act is about $260. The sale of a fake passport, on the other hand, can fetch up to five times as much.

Not only are fake passports used to send workers abroad, but in the past, they've also been used to traffic women and aid in terrorism.

While earlier the passports were produced and created from scratch, after measures to detect such passports were tightened, the racket now mainly adopts impersonation and photo substitution in the forging. The original passports are mostly sourced from recruiting and travel agents who obtain them from clients approaching them for visas. They sell the passports to the racketeers and tell their clients that they've lost the documents.

According to a Times of India article, in the months of January and February 2010, the Sahar police in Mumbai arrested as many as 124 people for involvement in fake passport and visa cases. They told the Times of India that they usually detect two fake passport cases a day and that the incidents have been rising in the last few months.

As many as 10,000 fake passports — either completely forged or tampered with — have been confiscated over the past 16 years and are stored in three cupboards at the Sahar police station, according to the report.

The Air India incident has come at a time when United Arab Emirates officials have been trying to tighten security on the borders. But as long as there are desperate workers, experts say, it's unlikely there'll be a drop in the passport forgery business.