Some time ago, I had written about the stupidity by which our governmental systems work or more correctly, work to make things complicated for the people so that the people keep losing faith in the systems of democratic governance as the time goes.
There are scores of such issues that keep proving the inefficiency or rather the stupidity of the people who man the governmental systems of administration in India.
One of the test case is the issue of certifying a citizen's identity and address and generating a valid document for that purpose.
It never used to be an issue at all in India during the initial half-a-century of its existence as an independent democratic republic.
But the successive ignorance, stupidity and incompetence of the people who kept managing the affairs of the nation's governance have increasingly made this rather simple affair into a very complex problem.
First and foremost, there is no law in India that has made any authority fully responsible for certifying a citizen's identity or address! The lack of such a law has caused all governmental departments to make their own stupid, contradictory rules in this context! The effect of this stupid non-governance is the mushrooming of hundreds of certifications all linked, contradictory and confusing.
In effect, criminals and aspirants of illegal activities can now have any number of governmental certifications in any manner they want! The only problem is for the law abiding citizens!
Take for example of the billions of rupees the government of India is spending for the creation of yet another authority for creating identities for the people called the Aadhaar! Is it a practical or essential thing for a country like India where more than half of its 1.2 billion population do not have any thing to be labelled as worthwhile citizens? Can any right thinking person would assume this kind of a bio-metric linked identification system foolproof for the Indian populace? If it is prone to any kind of error, then, this kind of a system, in my opinion, should not be forced on the people.
I had earlier written about it: the Unique Identity Crisis of India!
There had been views opposing and supporting. And after some years, the present government thought of making Aadhaar some kind of statutory authority by initiating the process of passing the Aadhaar Act 2016 in the parliament. It is yet to become a law and once it becomes, it will take several years for the law to become a foolproof operational system! Whether statutory or not, in this case, the Aadhaar Organisation (UIDAI) is operational!
Yet the whole process of making the Aadhaar identity document and its subsequent updating as per the citizen's requirement is a matter left to the officials as it has been so far. So there are several issues that create innumerable problems to the citizens who wish to use the Aadhaar card or the downloadable e-Aadhaar letter as a valid government certified document of identity and address.
Identity of a person is established with available documentary evidence supported by bio-metric data such as photo, finger and palm scans, etc. This has been done by outsourced private agencies employing semi-skilled local staff whose computer skills, dedication and commitment have not been fully tested by the apex authority.
This has caused the bio-metric data capturing and its linkage with actual bio-data of the person not getting properly done. Another stupid thing the authority has done is the duplication of bio-data in English and its automatic transliteration to the local language causing gross errors in the name, address and other data concerning an individual. (This is the same mistake the Election Commission of India also did by making their voter's identity cards! The effect is the creation of millions of false identities and virtual citizens!)
Now coming back to the Aadhaar card. Let me tell my own experience here. Though, me and my wife have gone and enrolled through the temporary Aadhaar enrolment centre of our area, we could not get the so-called Aadhaar card which the authority kept saying that they had sent through another government department-the India Post. We live in a prominent city area with a well known address and since we could not get it, then how on earth you believe that the India Post and UIDAI have delivered these to the millions of Indian people in the remote, inaccessible rural areas?
Later, the authority admitted that they cannot deliver the cards through the official couriers of the country and instead, they devised the e-aadhaar download process.
Now, this country has not yet achieved a basic literacy rate as comparable to the rest of the world. More than one fourth of Indians in this 21st century still lack the ability to read and write in their own mother tongues! (See this!). More than half of the Indians have not yet seen a computer! Then how do these UIDAI claim that they can download the e-aadhaar from their web site?
To be honest, even a relatively good computer savvy person also cannot get the e-aadhaar downloaded! It is a complicated process! The number of persons visiting my blog site and similar guidance sites and the doubts they keep asking reflect the ground reality!
Over the past many months, the UIDAI has been gradually improving their services through their website. This UIDAI website page claims to provide a facility for the citizens to update their address and other incorrect data online.
As my address changed, I tried to try the efficiency by which the UIDAI does this, my self. To be frank, I was totally disappointed. The method adopted by this website is not very user friendly. Our Indian banks dealing money transactions of the citizens and the scores of online goods and services providing websites are far superior and simple!
Now let me explain how the UIDAI does this through their software contractors!
For attempting the online updating of aadhaar, the individual needs to know his or her existing aadhaar number and should still be using the mobile number that he or she provided during aadhaar enrollment for the first time. (The latter is quite unlikely for many people as the UIDAI never told about such an eventuality initially and mobile number changing is not uncommon for people for several reasons!)
You can log in to the updating site using your existing aadhaar number and requesting the One Time Password (OTP) to be send to your originally registered mobile phone as a short message service (SMS). I was fortunate that I could do this, though I had to wait for the SMS to arrive patiently for several minutes. Finally it has come just at the time when I was deciding to quit!
Now address data is some thing which changes and most often there is no address any where in India that is permanently existing. You move to a temporary or permanent place of residence whose physical conditions keep changing. In fact, it is the resident who can best describe his place of residence! If a person has an established identity, it is not only ridiculous, but also stupid to ask him for a documentary proof of his residence when he is attempting to make one first time through this so-called aadhaar (which means basis in English!)
And the UIDAI authorities do just that! They need a basis for making their own basis! They need a foundation for their own foundation! Stupidity of what order? You can gauge it yourself!
Okay! In India things of this sort are always 'managed'. So imagine that you have managed to get such a documentary evidence of your address to which you have just moved in! The UIDAI is very liberal to give you a list of such documents that they accept as proof of address! (They have simply forgotten the fact that the person concerned is trying to get their aadhaar exactly for this purpose!)
Okay, since stupidity of this kind is not reserved to this authority only. So let us manage, proceed and see what happens next. I too did the same way.
In my case, it was the address of my own house and I have address proof in many forms existing for the past many decades, though they all differ to some extent depending on the manner in which I had filled my original forms and the manner in which the concerned officials of the concerned departments had copied those to their systems!
In fact, my aadhaar address as existing was my temporary address! So I wanted to change that to the permanent one!
Now the UADAI website informed me that this documentary proof should be a color scan of my document and the scanned image should not be more than 2 Megabytes (MB) in size. More over, it cannot be any thing which is edited (to reduce its size to their specification!) Seeing this, I was wondering the percentage of already existing (as claimed by UIDAI) aadhaar holders who could understand all these technical instructions!
But I had managed that too and was ready to do the inputs to the online form that opened up. I had failed to understand initially the disclaimer notice of UIDAI which stated like this:
If Resident is unable to locate the required Pincode/Village/Town/City/Post Office/District/State or is finding difficulty in local language transliteration, they may send their Update request through Post.
I was to learn about it the hard way, later!
The online form had fields to be filled up in English on the left side and some similar fields on the right side as well. I was trying to update my address, but the UIDAI wanted me to be caught in a tricky situation first!
The first field, I found not relevant to the situation, was to write the applicant's relationship name in a drop down box. Precisely, I have to click the drop down box to get the relationship box which read: S/O (son of), W/O (wife of) or D/O (daughter of) and then write the name of the husband or father (perhaps the way it was originally presented to them!)
Does this have any relevance in this case? I do not know. Only the "highly intelligent" UIDAI officials can know!
Now, my father's name will never change and it remains as it was told originally. I typed my father's name as before, in English, exactly the way it is in my existing e-aadhaar. Alas, I was finding a fantastic phenomena happening on the right side of the online form! The English name was getting automatically transliterated to Hindi on the right side! But the name has changed dramatically. It was some other name when pronounced.
I tried all the known computer techniques I knew. But it could not be corrected! Remember, this name is already in the aadhaar data correctly written in Hindi! Fantastic stupidity, I thought! The fellows who invented this software should be given the highest award of the nation for making a simple thing so complex so that no one can bother UIDAI with update requests! I said to my self.
As there was no way out, I decided to move forward. What is the problem if my father's name is written wrongly in Devnagari. My father or my self hardly ever wrote it that way! But remember, there is absolutely no difficulty for me to write that name in uni-code Hindi which is universal now-a-days. Only UIDAI and their programmers know how they brought this unique system to their site! Perhaps they they might be thinking that unique identity authority should do some thing unique!
Somehow I did the rest of the form filling and uploaded my digital documentary evidence and finished the online filling up of the up date form. I had to click another online affidavit telling truthfulness of my declarations and the matter got almost completed to my relief!
Then came the last question. The site demanded me to know to which of their data processing contractors out of the two, that I want my form to be forwarded. They also provided me the data about the workload of these contractors and the probable dates of completing the job by them. I clicked one of them.
Immediately I got a computer generated acknowledgement slip and an SMS. I was adviced to save them for future reference which I obediently did.
And you would be interested to know what happened next.
In less than 24 hours, the great contractors finished their task. They sent me an SMS which stated like this:
"Your Request 0000/xxxx/xxxx has been rejected due to: Transliteration error in the request field"
My dear reader! See how this UIDAI is punishing us for their mistake! Transliteration software is their invention! The citizens have nothing to do with that. Why do they want it in the first place? Why can't they correct it themselves? If it is essential that they need the Indian language to be there as well, why don't they have a software that allow the user to use the uni-code and fill the form correctly the way they want it to appear?
Now, the UIDAI have a solution to this as declared in their website.
See their notice that I had reproduced above. Persons who find it difficult to transliterate should sent the update forms by post!
But dear UIDAI, I am not finding difficulty in transliteration of my data. It is your automatic software that does not allow me to do it my self!
Now when I sent it by post, what is the guarantee that it will be done correctly by their own contract IT labor?
But sir, in this country, nothing is guaranteed!
It is your luck. If you are lucky, then things will be done by god! This is what we are taught from time immemorial!
So let us leave this too for god's intervention. Is n't it?
