Kathmandu, June 29 -- With the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs remain divided over the ability of German firms, Veridos GmbH and Muhlbauer ID Service GmbH, to deliver biometric passports from the third week of July, the government is in a mood to wait until the deadline before deciding its next course in the passport procurement process.

According to a senior official at the PMO, the prime minister's team is not confident that the German firms will start passport operations on July 19, the contractual deadline. The team believes that the migration of records of 20 million Nepali citizens from IDEMIA's legacy system to new German firms' platforms is incomplete, and the sample passport copies provided by t...