Bureaunia Chronicles: Episode 13
Today, Aithorix is Chief AI Advisor at Bureaunia. Yet, there was a time, decades ago, when an experience in his country made him feel utterly hopeless. That experience? Having to stand in a passport queue in Bureaunia. A day he remembers vividly, a day where his then young, impressionable mind realized how a state like Bureaunia truly functioned (by essentially not functioning). It was the day he recognized everything that was wrong with how public service delivery was conducted.
The passport office opened at 9 a.m. I’d been advised to arrive early, preferably before 7 a.m., to avoid long queues. So, I showed up at 6:30 a.m. only to find no less than 200 people already in the queue, a giant snake of anxious human beings circling the block.
It was late April, and the Bureaunian summer was in full swing, threatening temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius. Each of us in the queue waited to submit relevant documents to the passport agents for examination. If they were satisfied, they would hand out the passport form to the ‘eligible’ applicant.
All these steps would take place with us, the poor applicants, standing outside in the sun (or rain in some cases) with no shade while the passport agents sat inside the building, most likely enjoying air conditioning, and transacted documents with us through a narrow hole in the window.
For the lucky few of us who passed the scrutiny and were handed the application form, we would treasure it, protect it from the elements, take it home, fill it up, and come back another day to submit it in person to start the application process.
That was the rule. The rule was simple, I thought. I had been briefed by my uncle, who worked for the government,
Standing in the queue, I did some quick math. If the agents spent one minute on average reviewing the documents and deciding on “yay” or “nay”, that was 200 minutes before they would call me. However, since there were two counters, I’d be called in about a hundred minutes after 9 a.m. So, certainly not before 10.30ish. That meant that by then, I’d surely be fried by the sun. Over four hours in the scorching heat, to collect one paper form.
I couldn’t leave my place in the queue, not even to go to the toilet. Maybe that was why there were no public toilets anywhere in sight. I quickly realized that the advice to drink enough to avoid dehydration in the extreme heat was dangerous here. Certainly impractical. That was if you wanted your passport form today, of course. If nature’s call was more urgent, you would have to return to fight another day.
I needed the passport. So, I, Aithorix, waited patiently, basking in the excitement of travelling abroad.
I was over the moon as I earned a full scholarship at a reputed foreign university for my undergraduate studies and hence, needed a visa to that country. But, first things first: I needed a Bureaunia passport to get that visa stamped.
I didn’t worry about getting the passport. After all, it was from my own government.
I, however, did worry about not getting the visa. It was from a different government, one that did not necessarily like people from Bureaunia going abroad and staying there, especially illegally. In fact, I dreaded going to the embassy. I had heard horror stories about how rude the visa counselors were and how many applicants get rejected.
What I did not worry about was the passport application process in my own country. At least, not more than facing the dreaded visa officers.
Finally, the clock struck nine, but no counters opened. It was indeed 35 degrees. But it felt worse because people were standing close to each other. By that time, there were at least another 200 people behind me.
What was going on? Was there an emergency they had to handle inside the building? Or, were they leisurely sipping their morning tea because that mattered more than the anxiety of a few hundred people standing outside in the blistering sun? Nobody outside the building had any clue, and nothing was said from inside either.
The rule of the game for the outsiders was to wait patiently.
They finally opened one counter at around 9.30. My math had failed. Not once, but twice. My calculations did not account for the delayed opening of the first counter or the non-opening of the second counter. My new calculation projected me at the counter at noon, if I’m lucky.
Then, the third failure of my calculation dawned on me. I had wrongly assumed that this queue was only to collect passport forms. Far from it. In reality, this queue was the mother of all passport-related queues: collecting forms (simple), submitting completed forms with a photograph and a fee (not so simple), picking up ready passports (definitely not simple), fixing mistakes on the passport (God help you!).
I was sure there were other activities that one did with the passport office in this queue, but I had reached the limit of my complex calculations.
You might think I was trying to figure out how the passport process truly worked in the government, beyond the theoretical procedure that my civil servant uncle had explained to me. It was far from it. I was merely trying to estimate when I would reach the counter.
Clearly, I had grossly underestimated the average time per person ahead of me. I tried to console myself with the knowledge that I was the 200th person in the queue, and there was a 600th person for whom I should feel much worse.
Well, there was a happy ending to the story for the 200th person. I was able to collect the form mid-afternoon. What I could comprehend was whether the 600th person in line was able to reach the counter before it closed at 5 p.m. ough the cracks. We built the cracks. Then called it a system.
Bureaunia is imaginary, but the queues are real for every developing nation.
Anir Chowdhury
#BureauniaChronicles #DigitalTransformation #DigitalPublicInfrastructure #DigitalInclusion
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