The hamster wheel of sarkar

I first told the government my father’s and mother’s names more than fifty years ago. Not me personally, of course; nonetheless they’ve known it for at least two generations. And yet they ask for it again and again, even in application forms where this information should not matter. They also recorded my date of birth at that time, but having done so, they still want to know it again and again. In fact, over the years, they’ve added a long list of things they want to know again; even after the arrival of Aadhaar, this hamster wheel continues.

One possible explanation could be silos in government. The sarkar functions through so many departments – just because one collects some information, we cannot assume that the others should know it too. But one might also equally ask – why not? Is it so difficult to share that? Why can’t a department maintain the information it is given, so that even if it is not sharing it, at least it can stop asking for it repeatedly?

One time, I tried asking a department if they’d lost the information I had given them previously, and if not, why do they need it again. The official assured me they still have it but it would be hideously hard for them to retrieve it, and therefore they need to ask me once more. Which made me wonder – if you’ve lost the information, who checks the information each time I share it with someone who asks?

There’s a simple fix, of course, and thousands of private companies use it all the time. They give you an account number – which they also remember – and a password, and if you give them both of those, they tend to know the rest, and get on with ‘how can we help you?’ They don’t tell you they can’t retrieve it, or the person who took it has left the company or retired, etc. Somehow, this much has evaded our self-proclaimed reformers.

Why not give citizens an option to say ‘nothing has changed since the last time I made this application’? This could work for things like renewal of a document, like a passport or a driving license. Applicants could easily pull up their old record to confirm there is no change, give the old document number, and go straight to the processing centre with a new photograph and ID proof.

This reminds me; about 15 years ago, when the traffic police decided to go digital in a big way – I was on the Traffic Police Steering Committee back then – they wanted to get the complete database of vehicles registered in the state, so that when they issued a challan against a vehicle, they would know who to send it to and where. But the Transport Department didn’t want to share this, for reasons best known to them. It took some effort to sort that out; in the process, I learned two things.

One, the database was quite bad. Fewer than half the vehicles were in their digital records. And a big chunk of those were not up-to-date; in some cases, the vehicle had been sold several times since the data had been first entered. That made me think that the resistance to sharing the data was because of the errors. After all, no one likes it when others find out they’ve not been doing a good job.

Another incident that remains etched in memory happened after my grandmother passed away. At the BBMP-run crematorium, the clerk gave me a cremation certificate to take to a different office in BBMP for further processing to obtain a death certificate. Why not send it yourself, I asked, since you’re asking me to take it back to your own employer? “They are different, we are different,” he said. That’s not true, but it provides an opportunity for rent-seeking.

The logic of asking for information only when it has changed can speed up and reform all sorts of things. The fact that a very large part of most applications asks for information the receiver already has is surely something that can be quickly changed. It doesn’t change because of two reasons. One, the government has asymmetric power over the people and doesn’t miss an opportunity to show that, and two, failures in government would be exposed by any steps to reform it.

The everyday run-arounds that people experience reflect a larger problem in the state-market-society equation. Governments don’t think they are serving the public, so public employees – and even PSU workers – think of themselves as agents of state power, not as service deliverers. And that trickles down to a million things every day – reminding us that the State is supreme, and everyone else is secondary at best.