On a day when citizens were delighted at the Airports Authority of India promising seamless air travel allowing domestic flyers who link their tickets to their Aadhaar number to whiz through airports, the Union tourism minister got an earful from a distressed passenger whose flight out of Imphal was delayed by VVIP movement. This is the irony of our development models. We are riding on broadband coverage and Aadhaar penetration to offer peripheral technological solutions but core service delivery continues to be patchy.
So Aadhaar will help a flyer zip past the CISF security personnel at airport entrance. Don’t forget that more lines to scan baggage, check-in, clear security checks, and boarding await the flyer. But what happens if your biometric is not recognised and you carry no other identification believing that Aadhaar is a failsafe technology. Or worse, what if networks are down as it happens infrequently?
I am not one of the anti-Aadhaar activists. I am only against its widespread use for every conceivable purpose. I am not opposed to Aadhaar being used to link PAN cards, property registration, and disbursal of subsidies and scholarship. But Aadhaar to access an ambulance, get admission to a hospital or school, registering deaths, are perfect examples of administrators letting their Aadhaar fantasies run wild. It is another matter whether all the Aadhar tech wizardry is of any purpose if infrastructure is non- existent and services patchy.
What Union minister Alphons Kannanthanam faced was the unhappiness of a middle class citizen’s dismay at physical infrastructure not keeping pace with internet technologies that make our lives easier. The protests in Bengaluru and Mumbai on potholes, the alarm in Delhi over air quality, the anti-corruption protests of 2011-12 are all manifestations of middle class angst over India’s continued inability to offer world class services. Despite reports of massive Aadhaar authentication failures in PDS systems it is a miracle we are not seeing food riots. The poor in this country have been so crushed that their voices are being scarcely heard in the big cities.
It is only natural that people who book air tickets and make payments online and are delivered a bouquet of goods and services at the doorstep — all things that consumed hours of one’s time in earlier decades — will raise their voice when one arm of the service fails to buck up. Air travel may fair better than Indian Railways in punctuality and service quality but the expectations are that much higher and continually increasing. The inability to keep pace with expectations has led to the elite and rich abandoning government schools and hospitals. Now even famous public universities and colleges like Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University are losing out to newer private ones like Ashoka and Shiv Nadar.
But we also have shining examples of professionalism in the public sector like Delhi Metro and ISRO. VIP movement, hartals, large political rallies, are all disrupting ordinary lives in cities, small towns and villages. It is normal to associate these inconveniences with the practice of democracy in our country. A recent survey indicated a massive fascination with martial rule in India. The assumption is that the military is a disciplined, efficient and incorruptible organization. We only need to look at neighbouring Pakistan or Bangladesh during the Gen Ershad era to understand how misplaced these perceptions are. There is no alternative to liberal democracy in the foreseeable future but our politicians will have to be more receptive to public grievances and rectify problems in service delivery.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.
