The time taken for police verification of passport applications is now down to a week from nearly a month in Bengaluru, thanks to the online police verification project that opened in the weekend.The Bengaluru Regional Passport Office now plans to extend it to the entire city.With the quickening of the verification process, the waiting period for a passport in central Bengaluru - where five stations have gone online for the purpose - is expected to be around 10 days. The current waiting period in Bengaluru is around 30 days.The online police verification project - one of the three pilot projects in the country - was launched on May 14. The move is believed to have simplified police verification, a procedure widely perceived to be painfully time-consuming, especially for those in need of a passport urgently.Thanks to the new system, the Vivek Nagar police, one of the five police stations in central Bengaluru where the pilot is underway, verified 90 applications in just six days, the highest. The Ashok Nagar police verified 40 applications and the Halasooru Gate police have completed 18 in the same period."Earlier, the police would take 20-26 days to verify an application," Regional Passport Officer PS Karthigeyan said. "The Ministry of External Affairs says police verification should be done within 21 days but only half the applications could be verified on time."Two constables in each of these police stations were trained to use a tablet with an app designed exclusively for the purpose. Priority for passport verification at police stations was low as policemen were in volved in their core duties such as law and order.The simplification of the process now, it is believed, will accord it priority. Bharath HS, a constable at the Ashok Nagar police station, said about the new process: "Earlier, it was all manual. Most of our time went into collecting and submitting forms."In the new system, a constable continues to physically visit the applicant's house but once that is done, he has to simply fill the details into an online form. A GPS tracker records the visit and sends a message to the police commissioner's office.