Bureaunia Chronicles: Episode 15
Aithorix compares his journey with Stitchwel’s and discovers how unequal the system really is
I did a quick analysis of my passport experience. I paid the official fees a total of four times, spent about four months from the point of application to the date of picking up the passport, and went to different government offices eight times.
Then, I did a quick back-of-the-envelope analysis of Stitchwel’s passport collection experience. Stitchwel was a tailor in Villix, my uncle’s village home. He went to the Gulf to work as a bathroom cleaner around the same time I left for abroad. Hence, he needed a passport too, quite like myself. He was also a first-time applicant with no knowledge regarding the application process. Unlike me, he was nearly illiterate and lived about 700 kilometers away from the capital. Each trip to the passport office in the capital required twelve hours of traveling each way on ferries, local buses and rickshaws. Unlike me, he needed another person to travel with him because he was scared of the megacity.
Stitchwel paid twenty times the official fees, waited for a year, and made so many trips that he lost count. He had to spend weeks going to various offices in his district just to understand how to apply for a passport; making a trip to the capital to pick up the application form; going back to his village home to fill up the form; attaching a photograph and the bank receipt (the bank was in the capital); coming back to the passport office in the capital only to realize that he wasn’t allowed to submit the form because he missed something; and then finally, ending up hiring an ‘unofficial intermediary’, a broker who was hanging around outside the passport office. His friend, who accompanied him to the capital every time, gave Stitchwel the advice of hiring a broker because he figured out his sufferings had only begun. Even with the help of a broker, it would be a year before Stitchwel could get his hands on his passport. By that time, two job offers from the Gulf had come and gone, and he lost his registration fee for those jobs.
Stitchwel took out a loan to pay for the passport application fee, service charge for the broker and massive transportation costs. Stitchwel’s father sold their only piece of agricultural land to pay for the registration fees of the Gulf jobs he couldn’t avail because his passport wasn’t ready yet. Finally, he left Bureaunia for the Gulf a week before I left for my destination. Stitchwel’s first passport ultimately cost him and his family fifty times the official published fees, and a year of his life.
For me, it was a monumental waste of time. For Stitchwel, it was a forced nosedive into family debt that would probably take him years to pay off with high interest.
There are a handful of privileged, educated people like myself, who go for higher studies every year. But there are hundreds of thousands of marginalized, less-educated people like Stitchwel who go for menial jobs worldwide. We all apply for passports before we leave. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of millions of workdays disappearing from our lives.
Bureaunia is imaginary, but the queues are real for every developing nation. Next: Episode 16 — Did They Burn the Forms?
Anir Chowdhury
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