My pensieve

Nagaraj sir, who is an active member and holds some important position at Democratic Yoth Federation of India (DYFI), had asked me to come to his area with my laptop. Since Karnataka government had opened a portal, http://web1.kar.nic.in/rconline/ to apply for a ration card online, many cyber cafes had started charging hefty amount from poor people who were not able to apply for it themselves. Hence he wanted me to apply online for the people in his area. So at around 11:00, we set up a table outside his house. His neighbor had kindly agreed to give access to internet through his broadband and since he had a wireless router, it was easy for us to access it from where we were sitting.

Since I myself did not have a ration card and my mom had been pestering me for applying it online since last two months, I had applied for it last night and understood all the fields required to fill the form very well. Unfortunately in my case, it had not accepted my LPG gas connection number and due to this I had to say that I did not own a gas connection while applying for the ration card.

At around 11:30, few people started coming along with their electric bill. And I started applying for each one of them. I observed many interesting points.

Almost all these people had their own houses. This was not strange to me because I knew from my previous interaction at another slum that state government provides funds to people to build pakka cement houses. The agreement is that the family has to have its own land and they need to put the foundation themselves. The amount for the building the walls and roof will be given by the government. This was a good scheme because it ensured to some extent that the people do not misuse the money provided by the government.

In many cases, the R.R. No. of the electricity bill had already been used by someone else to apply for the ration card. Due to this the portal was not allowing anyone else to apply for a new card  for that particular electricity bill. In many cases, it turned out that the tenant of the house had applied for the ration card using the electricity bill due to which the owner themselves were not able to apply for a card.

By around 4:00, I had applied for 22 families. Since I was using Ubuntu, after completion of every application, I was able to store the complete application in a pdf format which Nagaraj sir had decided to give a hard copy to each applicants for their future use. Also the wonderful feature that the portal had was that after successful submission of the application, it was sending a sms to the applicant’s mobile number with an acknowledgement number.

In all, it was a great experience for me. I found a family where the husband was 5 years younger to his wife. We had to make sure that the birthday was actually correct. In another case, for one applicant there were 8 dependents and somehow while adding 5th dependent, the portal removed all the previously added dependents. At the end, we only applied for 4 dependents for the particular applicant.

Another interesting thing I saw was that most of the people were applying for a BPL(Below poverty line) card, which meant that they had to mention that their annual income was less than Rs. 36,000(I am not sure of this rule). However, only one person asked to mention his correct annual income saying that it wouldnt be right to mention less just for benefits.

There was another interesting applicant. She was a muslim lady who had come in Burkha. After waiting for around 30 mins and since she was way behind in queue, she asked me if I can apply for her next as there were all males in the queue now. I politely disagreed as all of them also had been waiting and few of them had already raised concerns that they had to go to work. Somehow she was not happy with this and before her turn came, she started pointing to my mistakes in other’s application forms and started talking in English to me. Also for her application, she had written all the details that was required and gave it to me. She felt proud to have done this and started bragging to her friend that since she had written it down and given to me, I shouldnt have any confusion in application process. However, I had failed to realize that she was actually applying with her husband’s name and hence I had by mistake marked it as a female applicant. So I had to go back to the initial webform and correct it. I felt that she was very angry that I had made such a silly mistake.

However, the biggest satisfaction that I got during the day was that how the technology had helped these people apply for the ration card without which they would have atleast had to spend their one full day going to the government office and standing in long queues and then running around with documents or in the best case, pay around Rs. 1000 to a broker to get it done for them. Infact I remember my cousin brother had paid around 2500 to an agent for both ration card and gas connection for his family. It was only because of my laziness that I had also not gone through an agent to apply for the ration card.

Also at around 4:00, since I had some other personal work, I decided to leave. However the neighbor who also about my age and who had been kind enough to allow us to use his internet connection had also started applying for others and this way I was satisfied that now the area will not need me to come again for applying as the neighbor would do it for them.

Nagaraj sir has already suggested another locality where we can go next time whenever I am free. I certainly feel very proud of having done a small contribution to so many families. Of course, we have only applied for the ration card for them and still the process of verification by the food officer remains and it is only after this that the families will get a ration card.

This experience also gave me lot of food for thought regarding the controversial project, UID. I will try to summarize those thoughts in a separate post soon.