Sunil Sethi: Off-key and off-queue

Does bureaucracy ever give up? Not really. Do public-private partnerships take off in delivering essential services? Not if the public partner ends up strangling the private. A critical example is the setting up of Passport Seva Kendras, which make speedy execution and delivery mandatory for registration of passport forms online — as is every Indian’s birthright, a beaming foreign minister announces on the website. However, the collaboration between the ministry of external affairs (MEA) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a mixed blessing; it’s not quite what it’s cracked up to be.

The good news is that the chaos, squalor and corruption of the old passport office, which looked like an extension of Old Delhi railway station (a melee of touts, crowds, nasty officials and reeking toilets), have gone. The new office on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, Delhi’s Fleet Street, is different. It’s pretending to be an international airport terminal — provided you can get in. This does not mean that getting a passport has become easier or quicker. It is more orderly, yes, but as time-consuming and tedious as before. It can take four to five hours of queuing and waiting from entry to exit, encounters with five layers of officialdom, and up to a month for your “birthright” document to arrive.

The trouble starts with the bureaucratic nature of the online registration to get an appointment at the Seva Kendra. The form-filling process is long and laborious and, unless you are a professional geek, difficult to navigate. After uploading the forms, you must hit the site at 6 p m, not before or after, to book an appointment slot. Thousands of applicants have got the message so the site is often jammed at that hour. Stalls have come up outside the passport office to help people register online, an example of the back-door entry endemic to Indian bureaucracy. The sun beats down pitilessly on applicants, elderly or with small children, queuing on a cramped, crowded street with no parking or waiting room in sight. Once out of this terrible location and inside the pseudo-airport terminal, you quickly realise what is wrong with this public-private partnership model.

There is open resentment, even hostility, between the relatively young, polite and helpful TCS staff on the lower floors and the middle-aged, surly MEA clerks sipping Tata tea from chipped cups on the second floor. The private sector employees issue tokens, take fingerprints, photograph and collect fees. The government employees (known as VO and GO, for “verification officer” and “granting officer”) tick applications manually. Neither can cope with the confusion and crowds. When the digital display for file numbers broke down, a VO barked at an applicant, “Ask the TCS people downstairs to repair it. It is not our job.” A grumpy GO ticked off a group of humble villagers wandering from pillar to post: “Hum bhi khanabadosh hain. Sarkar se poocho sabko kyon yahan patak diya hai.” (“We are also gypsies like you. Ask the government why we have all been dumped here.”)

Admittedly, acquiring a passport is a more complex exercise than paying an electricity bill or buying an air ticket online. It centres on questions of security and identity, hazardous in a country where citizens from the north-east are mistaken for Tibetans and rounded up by the police, or a Muslim from Bengal is routinely taken to be a Bangladeshi. Conversely, rackets in fake passports abound: gangsters and illegal migrants possess counterfeits aplenty.

Like other large-scale government services, Passport Seva Kendras cannot be completely successful or efficient without something approximating a National Population Register. It is an issue that has been giving people like Nandan Nilekani sleepless nights as his Unique ID project flounders in the labyrinth of the Union home ministry. Numerous public-private partnership projects, from highways to power, are held up, locked in court battles with soaring costs, because of bureaucracy’s dirty fingerprints all over the reform sheet. They are off-key and off-queue.