By Gouri Dange, Pune Mirror | Updated: Aug 29, 2017, 02.30 AM IST
Those who came in late are sentenced to being Niraadhaar
Those of us who were in on the early stampede for the Aadhaar card and got this tremendous sense of personal and national achievement once it came into our anxious, waiting hands, we must consider ourselves lucky. I’ve been watching just one young Indian national and her two kids struggling to get one, and it would have been a funny story if it wasn’t so aggravating.
And this is not about the fundamental questions and faults of the scheme itself. There are many cogent and uncomfortable questionings of the whole UIDAI and its Aadhaar scheme by many well-qualified-to-speak people, and there have been no satisfactory answers.
What we are talking about here, however, is a citizen who accepts that she needs to get herself and her kids the A-card, and is trying systematically to go about doing just that. She has just returned from a long stint in an African country, and is re-rooting back in India. It was not possible to get the whole thing going when she came here on brief vacations.
Some of us ‘lucky’ ones got to do our own running around and deciphering right at the very beginning. Some building societies were organised enough to get a person with the Aadhaar machine right at their doorstep, dedicated to just the residents of the place. But now, the random and lone citizens stumbling about to get the coveted card in place, have a deliciously absurd time.
Here’s just one case, of a young educated woman with a new job and two small kids. Over the last two months, in pursuit of the Aadhaar card, she has gone online, made calls, taken unpaid leave from a new job, planted her kids on someone so that she can go on this wild goose chase, and always come away unattended. The big card centre near her home in Bavdhan is closed indefinitely; there are people in there, very polite, but with no particular explanation why their centre has gone dead. They kindly point her to the Fergusson College Road centre, where she comes out with a similar no-go experience. These people point her to the Law College Road one, who cannot do it (note, that all of this takes half a working day easily in just the coming going and collection of ‘no’. The Laxmi Road centre, she is told, has closed down. And agent somewhere near Poona College tells her that his system is down and there is no saying when it will be up and running again. Same thing with a centre in Kothrud — non-operational indefinitely, she was told, once she reached there.
She then calls up a nagar sevak type, who asks her to come to his office and take his visiting card and present it to the Balewadi Aadhaar Centre. He gives her a phone number and is told that she must call beforehand, as there is a waiting list for the waiting list at the Balewadi centre. She does this, and is told by Balewadi to come on a Thursday at 4.30 pm. A proper appointment. Ah, light at the end of the tunnel. Another half-day without pay, and off she goes, after making arrangements for the kids to be looked after. Only to be told at Balewadi (after being given that appointment hardly five days earlier) that their “service provider didn’t file IT returns so all applications made from his centre are getting rejected”. Huh? Is all that she could manage to say, and return home with a new lead: Aundgaon jao, madam. Nakki milel. Monday la.
(Now all these troubles seem like nothing compared to recent events at Chandigarh and Panchkula, and maybe we should stop cribbing and daily go down on our knees and give thanks that we have the opportunity to run from pillar to post chasing the Holy Grail without being molested, murdered, marauded or manhandled. Always, for us in this new India, the cold comfort of being better off than someone and someplace else.)
One of the things perhaps she could do, after Aadhaar from Aundhgaon turns out to be a non-operational project, is do her homework on which city or state has its act slightly together, and take a non-paid vacation (as opposed to single-day leaves without pay) and apply for the card in such a place, if it exists? Or would that be yet another exercise in futility, one wonders.
If an educated woman with the ability to take herself hither and yon (albeit at some cost) is given such a run around, we can imagine what the less fortunate must be dealing with. Time to sing that line from the famous Asha Bhonsle Marathi song Jivalagaa: “Niraadhar mi, mi vanavaasi”. (I am without support, and shut out in the cold.)