Thales and local partner Just in Time Technologies (JITT) have been awarded the contract to supply Sri Lanka’s biometric passports, which are planned for a rollout next year.

The first batch of 100,000 chip-based passports are scheduled for delivery by Thales by July 2025, with an agreement to supply one million passports annually over five years, according to local newspapers. A previous government statement suggested the first biometric passports would be ready for issuance in January.

The Ministry of Public Security will submit a cabinet paper to procure the co-developed public key infrastructure and propose personalizing passports using their system on a fee-per-passport basis. This change would incur additional fees for the new personalization services from the consortium.

The transition has brought new challenges to the Department of Immigration and Emigration of Sri Lanka, which has introduced a mandatory prior online registration for new passport applications to reduce congestion at the head office.

However, this new appointment system has decreased the daily issuance of the legacy machine-readable passports from 3,000 to 800, leading to a potential revenue loss of approximately US$13.2 million, according to local newspapers.

Thales has experience delivering identity documents with integrated biometric technology for over 150 government programs. This contract awarded by the government of Sri Lanka comes after Thales announced last year that it will provide biometric travel and digital ID to the Finnish police and chip-based passports to the United States.

- BiometricUpdate.com