If the government tech could have been as slick as its advertisements India would have been a different place to live. Ease of life and ease of business are great catchphrases, but if you struggle through the rigmarole of government tech enabled services, which you possibly cannot avoid, you are in for a nightmare. The Bangalore eKhata experience can put government / party diehards to dismay, including retired bureaucrats who have spent over three decades with the government. One Bangalore founder recently talked about ‘six visits for password reset.’ He tried to highlight the confusion in public portals.
The big talk about India’s rise in global ease of doing business ranking will not be sufficient to assuage your emotions if you have to work through the real-life government portals. It would be way more complicated compared to what it is made out to be.One Bangalore startup founder shared how a simple password reset on Karnataka’s PTO-007 portal led to six visits to government offices and still the issue remains unresolved. This is just to highlight a continuous tragedy that many business owners face quietly everyday. The challenge is to navigate online government systems.
The issue is not related to just one portal, it goes far beyond it. As you get into each of the major basic services things start getting worrisome. Across the major platforms- PAN, Aadhar, GST and Passport – each follow “its own set of rules on how names are entered and stored, leading to mismatches and endless paperwork. To understand the issue in question, the example given by the concerned founder is very relevant. “PAN wants first name, middle name and last name, whereas Aadhar prescribes surname, middle name and last name. GST has its own logic. Passport? God only knows what they are asking.
Government has dumped the half baked portals on us in a variety of ways. Regional differences have confounded the problems. The naming conventions are different. First names in North India often mean something different in South India, where initials are common. The siloed nature of tech understanding and usage different departments have is at the core of the problem. It becomes intriguing the way the systems have been designed. For PAN surname starts from the fifth character but Aadhar disagrees. Who is at the receiving end; who else could it be – the hapless citizens. He suggests that the major departments- PAN, Aadhar, GST, Income, passport and bank need to agree on one naming standard. What the entrepreneur requires is a clear system that works, and certainly not months back
and forth over a name.
ONE NAMING CONVENTION IS THE WAY FORWARD, THE SOONER, THE BETTER
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.