I just have to save this article in case the link above decides one day, not to work! Ben Doherty wrote the following article for The Age newspaper recently. For Delhiites, at least we know we're not imaging it! For those "outstation" .. please don't laugh, this is sometimes what we're subjected to!
Chequemate: you can bank on Delhi pedantry
Ben Doherty, Delhi
February 12, 2011
''NO SIR, we do not accept cash.'' He beamed at me from across the desk.
''But … but you're a bank,'' I replied, in a tone some distance beyond incredulity.
''Yes sir, we cannot accept cash at this bank.'
''But that's what banks do, they look after people's cash. What are all these people doing if …'' My dissertation on the fundamentals of monetary systems trailed off. I was getting nowhere.
The rules told my bank guy that I needed a cheque to open an account. ''A personal cheque,'' he added.
''So,'' I said, carefully: ''I need a cheque to open a bank account, but in order to write a cheque I need a bank account.''
''Precisely, sir,'' he said, smiling ever more broadly.
I was going to ask how the first bank account ever opened in India came into being, but I could see logic would be no match for protocol.
The next bank was no better. ''Your signatures don't match,'' the ''account relationship manager'' told me.
My signature is a bit of a scrawl, but it's a consistent one, I argued.
''No, see here, it's different,'' she said, pointing to what might generously be described as my flourish. It was perhaps two millimetres higher the second time around
''We will have to fill out an explanation form to explain the difference,'' she said. ''Here and here you need to sign like you did here, and here you need to sign like you did there.'' I did as instructed. ''Now you need to sign it, to attest that it was you who filled out this form.''
''Oh, the signature is different again. We will have to fill out another form to explain this one.'' And so it went. On, and on. It took me five goes before she was satisfied.
As well as wanting a number of scribbles, the explanation forms ask you to state why your signatures are different. The first two times I took my whack and attributed it to ''poor handwriting''.
On the third form I wrote ''pedantry''. She got the joke. She didn't laugh.
Forms are a serious business in India.
The phone company cut my mobile phone off the other day because a man they sent around to my house, unannounced, to verify that I lived there discovered I wasn't home. These were considered grounds to render me mute to the outside world.
At their shop I explained the concept of ''mobile'' telephony, but this, again, proved joyless. I must wait for the man to return to my house so that he could see I lived there.
The airport was the same. Collecting my meagre possessions from the cargo bay took more than six hours, and involved visiting at least 20 bureaucrats separated by a distance of several kilometres of corridors so they could sign a piece of my paper pile or demand money from me. One particularly customer-oriented chap just grunted, drew an X on the first of my sheaf of papers and motioned to the door. We were done.
India's slavish devotion to bureaucracy, to protocol and process, is legendary. To the uninitiated it seems pedantic and obfuscationist. It is just how India works
But while for foreigners it's so often a subject of wry aside (except when you're signing your name for the 50th time in a bank) many Indians regards it as a serious problem for the country
While ''New India'', the tech companies and manufacturers of the emerging economic superpower, forges ahead, the inflexible regulation and endless red tape of ''Old India'' hold the country back, deterring foreign investment and international trade.
The Indian public service is consistently rated the worst in Asia, and, perhaps more tellingly, in a survey of Indian public servants themselves a third agreed theirs was the least efficient civil service across the fastest-growing continent on earth. ''They are a power centre in their own right at both the national and state levels, and are extremely resistant to reform that affects them or the way they go about their duties,'' Hong Kong firm Political and Economic Risk Consultancy said in a survey finding.
By far the worst of it is the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, which every non-Indian living in the country must attend once a year to have his or her visa extended and ratified.
Expat parents in Delhi tell their children this one day a year is ''anti-Christmas''.
It involves lining up for hours from near-dawn in order to get a number. This number gives you a place in yet another line.
It is the front of that hallowed queue that entitles you to be bounced from bureaucrat to bureaucrat as your bona fides are meticulously, painstakingly picked apart.
You're required to bring at least 20 pieces of paper that identify you in some, often overlapping, way. Have just one missing, unsigned by a notary, or with a slightly anomalous signature (please, not this again), and your day is finished. You can try again tomorrow.
But even if everything is in perfect order, even if you're at the very front of the very first queue in the morning, there is still the waiting. In my case, eight hours after I had arrived I was finally in the country legally."
No need for another word really!
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