BHOPAL: Here’s a reminder — your passport is government property and it’s probably a good idea to keep it with the family jewels. An applicant for a duplicate passport learnt this the hard way when he was fined Rs 5,000 for claiming that rats gnawed up his passport.

Officials explained that he was fined for carelessness in handling the passport. Regional passport officer Rashmi Baghel told TOI that when a passport is issued, it is expected that the holder takes care of it.

“It is, after all, government property. If someone applies for a fresh passport in the ‘damaged category’, he has to pay a fine, along with the usual fee. In this case, a few pages of the passport had been completely gnawed away. He confessed that the passport was lying among his books and that his house was mice-infested. So, he had to pay a fine of Rs 5,000 for damage to government property as he failed to keep the document in a safe place where it won’t come to any harm,” said Baghel.

Such extreme cases, where entire pages of the passport are missing, don’t come very often, said Baghel. “A few months ago, another man came to us with his passport in tatters. He said he forgot to take it out of his pocket after travel when he dumped all his clothes in the washing machine,” she said. Jet-blasted and spun dry, most of the passport came apart in little bits.

“Passport is a serious document and should not be taken casually. The man whose passport got washed also had to pay a heavy fine as most of the pages went missing and there was severe damage to the front and back pages,” the RPO added. It’s so serious, in fact, that if someone applies twice under the ‘damaged’ category, they may be treated as a habitual offender and denied a fresh passport.

“Damage from water spill and ink stains are common. We get a lot of these cases, and we understand that mishaps happen. But cases where pages go missing are very serious as the applicant may be involved in some illegal activity. So, if the RPO finds that a person has applied for fresh passport under ‘damage’ category more than once, it can turn down the request because that person is not capable of taking care of a government document,” explained Baghel.