India's great leap forward into technology, accompanied by dollops of government services privatization, is doing away with the late and unlamented queue, in which private citizens used to spend hours.
Change is fast becoming more and more apparent, with the individual the beneficiary. Although no statistical evidence exists on the time spent standing in queues before India's querulous and ill-tempered bureaucrats, it must have amounted to quite a bit of the lifetime of several of our ancestors, grandparents, fathers, mothers and us.
The payment of electricity bills may have been the worst - it was so bad that there was a queue to get in the queue. That is, the actual queue to pay the bill was so long that private agencies and individuals took it upon themselves to pay the bills for other people for a fee. But so many people patronized the agencies that the queues to hire the agencies were bigger than the real queue.
This is no joke. Until recently - in most places less than the last year - some members of the family were forced to take a day off from work to pay the electricity bill. The lucky ones who had aging, retired and often ill grandparents delegated. But it was a sorry sight. Paying the telephone bill was equally arduous. The problem was the monopoly status of the government in dispensing these services.
Further, any reneging or delay in payment led some slothful public sector employees to take on unmatched speed and skill to disconnect the services. Harassment to make money was their motto. Then Internet-savvy private banks came to the fore. Both telephone and electricity bills can now be paid online.
A click on the "bill payment" section from the comfort of one's home or office computer takes care of a host of services - credit cards, electricity, loan premiums, cell phone bills to name a few. The queues have disappeared and the process takes but a few minutes. Private foreign and Indian banks have further contributed their might to reducing queues - ATMs, online requests for drafts and fixed deposits have made the process of waiting for the cashier or manager at an unfriendly public bank a thing of the past.
Online share trading, with several banks acting as brokers, is catching on. The Internet has also resulted in the elimination of several other queues. Train reservations, another long drawn out affair, now are available online. So is the booking of cinema tickets, which at one time or other contributed to ever-increasing statistics of more and more Indians waiting unendingly their turn in line.
The filing of tax returns too once engendered an army of touts and agents who took turns to stand in line for a commission. Now the forms can be downloaded and submitted online. Another queue has been nipped at the bud. Not too long ago, a telephone connection was the exclusive domain of bureaucrats and politicians who doled out the favors like feudal lords. The waiting period was years and the list more than a million.
There were even reports of women sleeping with politicians to avail themselves of personal telephone facilities. The advent of private players has meant that the public sector employees have finally been jolted by fears of voluntary retirement schemes and redundancy. The customer service has never been better; as a matter of fact often better than even the private players who are driven only by money. Privatization has also meant that almost anybody above the poverty level can afford a cellular telephone.
The customer is the real king. One more example in this sector is the phone directory service - earlier one waited and waited for the operator only to be rudely told off. But now, India's directory assistance ladies are sweeter than honey. Analysis has shown that the government people are reacting positively to the challenge of competition and in several cases are doing quite well.
They have even been known call to inquire whether a complaint has been attended to. Similar has been the case for cars, Liquefied Propane Gas (LPG) and airline tickets, all of which are now available over the counter or the telephone or online. A few years ago, there were special government quotas to book cars and many a senior government official prided himself on having cars released for relatives.
The only planes one could use belonged to Indian Airlines, who took their own sweet time to fly and sometimes did not. LPG was delivered by whim. Food for the family be damned. However, problems still fester. Drivers' licenses and passports are still a hassle. As cars become increasingly available through easy loan schemes, traffic has become a nightmare and Indians now find themselves facing the brunt of traffic queues as roads, the key infrastructure area, still leave a lot to be desired.
The airports too remain in a state of decline, with immigration and customs clearance a long-drawn-out process. Power is the monopoly of the government in most of India, making an irregular and often non-existent electricity supply a bane for citizens. Nobody, however, can deny that technology and the unleashing of private entrepreneurial spirit has made things a lot easier for people living in India, as well as the many others who are part of the reverse brain drain process.
The queues are dwindling.
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