Passport, Income Tax and a red Signal

One of the things I am scared of is going to the government offices. The way people in government offices make you run around is not funny. During this visit of Delhi, I had to interact with the government officials for more reason that one.

Passport

Mira's passport has been delayed by the passport official for one reason or the other for the past ten months or so. This time they had asked us to submit an affidavit of our marriage and an ad in two national newspapers saying that Sunita's name is Sunita. (Mira has always been Sunita officially and the name on his driver's license and voters card is Sunita)

To get all this done, we first had to go to the Janak Puri's transport authority to get hold of a Notary Public who would give us two affidavits, one for the passport office and one for the newspaper. In one place is the passport office that is asking me for countless proofs of name and on the other hand is the notary public that is not the least bothered about any proof while making the affidavits for us and why should he be bothered about anything when the “Price is right”. I could have taken a guy along with me dressed in a burka instead of Mira and he'd have given me the affidavit for all he cared.

Any way armed with the proofs we landed up at the passport office. People here are quite enterprising. Once something is set up, a lot of other businesses supporting it spawn like mushrooms around it. “Sahib, anything you want to get done in the passport office?” asked a tout as I got out of my car and another one said “New passport, passport renewal, ECNR” like a guy selling movie tickets in black outside a cinema hall. The touts are not the only people surviving like plankton sticking on the ship of passport office. There are people selling food and drinks (mostly illegal hawkers) and the parking attendants parking cars in no parking area for those extra 10 bucks a part of which is definitely going to the cops who turn a blind eye to the cars parked in the no parking area and people driving in the no entry zone.

Once inside the passport office, I was confronted with the semi-gods of bureaucracy running our country. He looked up the file on his computer and updated me on the status and I showed him the proofs and documents that I had gathered. He asked me if the proof was for change of name. I told him it could be called that “Yes, you can say it is for change of name, while in reality it is very natural thing for a girl to use the family name of her husband after getting married.” He looked at the documents and asked “What is Harish?” I told him that Harish is my surname and he got more curious “But usually Harish is the first name” He said it like it is an offence to have Harish as your surname and I would be punished for it by whipping my arse in the public. My patience that was already running thin finally gave in “Well it is my misfortune that Harish is my family name.” The guy turned a little sympathetic “Why call it a misfortune.” He sort of assured me that it is not really a crime. I told him my plight “If it is not my misfortune that you won't have made me run around like crazy for the past tem months.”

The man asked us to wait outside his office while he asked someone to get our file. I sat there cribbing about the whole thing for half an hour when he called us again “I still have not found your file, you can leave your documents with us and I will try to make sure that you don't have to come here again.”

A couple of days later we went to the passport office again, this time dad was also with us. This time Mira and I had decided to give a piece of our mind to the passport guy. We decide that if he still creates any more trouble for us, we are going to ask him to keep the file and that we don't need a passport anymore and we would prefer to get a forged passport and face the risks rather than take any more abuse form the passport office.

To our surprise, the guy looked up the file on his computer and gave us the news we have been waiting for too long “We have made this passport and you will be getting it sometime in the first month of September.”

Income Tax
I decided to file my income tax from Delhi instead of Bombay and went to the same guy who is filing my returns for the past two years. When I went to Delhi I knew that I would be required to pay some tax in addition to what has been deducted from my salary but little did I knew how much.

The accountant looked at the papers and told me what I had been expecting. I had changed the job in the last financial year and TIS did what a lot of other employers do while calculation the tax. In the column of any other income they wrote nil, instead of my salary that I was drawing from QAI. The ignored the salary I was getting at QAI and gave me the standard deduction twice and the slabs for income tax they used were also incorrect. I don't know how this happened but it is not a good idea on the part of Income tax department to just assume that I was not working anywhere before I joined the new company.

After some calculations he looked at me told me the bomb I owed the income tax department. I knew I would be paying something but the amount he told me was 5 times more than what I expected.

The next day I had to go to my bank to pay the tax that wiped off everything except one thousand bucks from my account. This makes my current trip to Delhi the most expensive one.

Red Signal
A day or two after reaching Delhi, some guy was standing outside my door with some papers in his hand. He asked me “Navin Harish?” I said yes and he handed me a paper and asked me to sign another one.

It was a fine for jumping a red signal in the month of February. My car jumped a red light on Baba Kharag Singh road. My brother may have been driving the car but 99% chances are that it is a mistake on the part of the cop while writing down the number because bhai is in Chandigarh, not Delhi. I treated as one of those random fines you get and you are better off paying them than arguing with them.

I was a little surprised that now they are delivering the fines by hand but that guy cleared my doubts “It is notice, the challan must have come by ordinary post.” Ordinary post that was so ordinary that the postman decided to throw it away rather than delivering it to me.

On the appointed day, I went to the Magistrate's office at Janpath with dad. As I reached there some guy came to me asking for the notice. Assuming that he was an employee of the court, I handed him the notice. He looked at it and said “Hundred bucks for this, hundred bucks for this and 165 bucks-a total of 365 bucks. I will get it done for 300 bucks.” Before I could figure out what was happening, dad snatched the paper from the tout and gave it at the window where it was supposed to be given.

First I was asked to sign a register that said that I plea guilty for the offence, then I was asked to pay a fine of 100 bucks and then I was asked to wait for the receipt. All this took about 3 hours and waiting in between these exercises, I was observing other people. There were lawyers-not the kind of lawyers you see in news making statements on behalf of their clients. The lawyers you see there are the ones I would like to say are -third rate. They come from the least preferred law schools where they got admission by bribing someone and passed the exams by copying the answers on their sleeves or better yet, sending someone else t appear in exam in their place. One of the lawyers was chewing pan; one was looking like a typical Bihari wearing cheep sport shoes with his court dress. All of them were trying to extract money from people who came there. A large percentage of those people were drivers who didn't know any better. The others decided to pay them to avoid the wait (but they did have to wait.)

All of this made me think about the opinion I had about the government offices. I used to think they are inefficient but I was completely wrong. They are not inefficient; they are more efficient and organised then the private sector. The work doesn't happen there because they don't want to do it. It takes ages to do anything but you must watch their speed after showing them the face of Gandhi ji. The same people who made you run around will start running around you after you offer them a little incentive for doing it.

The efficiently of those people is directly proportional to he money you offer. Gandhi, after all, is one man you can take for face value.