The eight officials, drawn from the ministry of external affairs, the National Informatics Centre, the Indian Security Press (Nasik) and the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, had an appointment to keep at the inter-operability test centre in the US Department of Homeland Security.

All the e-passports were scanned at multiple 'readers' to check if they could be read smoothly. Of the five companies involved in the project, the passports of two could not be read - the rest passed with flying colours.

"We found that while the American e-passport took a minimum of 10 seconds to be read, our passports took just four seconds," said a beaming Indian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

According to a member of the team, the reason for the quicker response of the chip in Indian passports was the software developed by IIT-Kanpur and NIC.

"Unlike the US software which is proprietary and developed by vendors, ours is entirely made in-house. So there is no commercial aspect to it," Rajat Moona, professor of computer science at IIT-Kanpur, told IANS.