- Bribe Fighter
- 8 years ago
- 6747 views
Sembium Sub-Registrar Office
I am here to report the shameless act of a Junior Assistant work at Sembium sub-registrar office. His name is G.Kumar and he is in-charge of marriage registration and certificate department. He was persistent and demanding for bribe at multiple occasions during the whole process of my marriage registration.
I and my wife approached the marriage registrar office in October 2015 with the intention of registering our marriage officially. Since my wife is a foreign national, I have to register my marriage under special marriage act, 1954. We collected the details of documents required and procedure by the first week of October 2015 and we submitted the documents on 29-10-2015. Subsequently, we got married on 17-12-2015 after lots of hardship. Please find the full details in subsequent paragraphs.
From the first time I rejected the demand for bribe, the junior assistant is not very helpful, often he is delaying the process and few times gave wrong information. First of all, the junior assistant is not very clear on the procedure of special marriage act. He demanded that presence of my in-laws (which is unnecessary) during submission of documents and during the marriage registration which will happen after 30 days of submission. I politely rejected this by citing the rules and procedures listed in Tamil Nadu government website. This incident probably rubbed him in the wrong place.
On the day of Submission of document (29-10-2015) Mr. G. Kumar, demanded Rs.1000 as fees for processing my documents. As I do not know what the actual fee is, I requested for a receipt. My request for receipt is obviously rejected and in response I refused to pay Rs.1000. When I found what government fee is, I was shocked. It is just Rs.3 (three rupees). And I paid him only Rs.3 at the end.
II) According to law, I can register my marriage any time after 30 days from the day of document submission. So we went to the register office on 17th of December, to complete the registration process. This time the junior assistant is delaying the process during marriage registration as a revenge by giving us wrong information. For example he made us fill three different forms (wrong forms on first two times), without flinching and utter disregard to our time. After completing the process he again demanded bribe citing that he has to pay temporary staffs (who are helping him in processing the documents and typing). I again turned down his demand which infuriated him and he told that he will delay the issuance of certificate as my as possible (as per the rule the certificate should be issued on the next day).
Of course, he could not delay it much as I approached his superiors directly to get the certificate with in few days.
The third part of my story is to get apostille on the documents. The document must be apostilled for it to be recognized by other countries. As I mentioned earlier my case is an international marriage so I need apostille on the document. Again for apostille the document should be verified and attested as genuine by Sembium sub registrar office. This time he is holding my document for the last 15 days citing various reasons (this process will generally take couple of days). I am still struggling to get the apostille document from him.
As much as I do not want to pay bribe, I am tired of dealing with such corrupt officials. That’s why I want to report him so that someone in future does not have to go thru the same experience.
Sincerely,
Srinivasan D
Details of the officer
Name of the officer : G. Kumar
Date of incident(s) : 29-10-2015 (4 PM) & 17-12-2015 (3 PM)
Location : Sub-Registrar office , Sembium, Perambur, Chennai
Designation : Junior Assistant