Applying for various cards in India seems more of a test of patience, than getting your work done.
Wherever you are on this planet , you have an identity. The most common form of it is your name, whether you are black,white,brown, eskimo, turk, red Indian or just plain Indian, an identity is something which personifies the human experience. Facing government officials to get things done in India however might question this very identity. For a minute it may seem that you’re being stripped of this honour. Procedural norms seem so suspicious of the very existance that you are made to produce every document you can possibly get your hands on. All this to prove that YOU is YOU and not someone else! Unless of course, cloning wakes out if its fantasy.
Cards, that say you are the person who you claim to be , come in the form a Driving License, voting card, Income Tax card, and the most complex Ration card, have become a necessity.
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Lets consider you need a ‘ration card’ somewhere in small town India. Most government offices demand you to produce this card as proof of where you live. But what it really is meant to provide is basic food supplies at subsidized rates. Having recognized the need by citizens of obtaining this card , the food supplies department takes more than 6 months to process applications. That’s not all, they conveniently divide the entire process into 2 phases. The initial phase which they camouflage by calling it ‘ The first phase’ ,while in reality it is the ‘Unfinished phase’ of applications collected for over 6 months. Ask the officials this and ‘pop’ comes the reply “ We were busy taking photographs of our applicants, sir”. If they run out of this excuse then, the presence of the sheer number of applicants on their tables is ready as excuse. And to make matters even more snail paced, time seems to stand still on the number of days the doors of the government offices remain shut.
Besides, what agonises most applicants in the system is interdependency of producing one card in order to obtain the others. This is where the sluggish nature of the bureaucratic machinery shows up.
You might assume that once this is over, you have your ‘Card’ , but what you end up doing is wait for another 6 months. And while you grumble and mumble over the government’s ineffciency, your papers enjoy a motionless bliss, collecting dust as the days go by. In effect if you apply for a card , it is physically present with you only after a year. Till then all you get to see is a long winding queue- a micro section of the ‘One billion’ strong India. If making a nation wait endlessly and patiently is what the government machinery seems to be doing then why must the democratic population wait for five years to vote their representatives. Indian democracy is no different than a queue, as every sprouting political leader makes empty promises as he wold have waited five years to get there.
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