• I Paid A Bribe
• 13 years ago
• 510 views

Passport Saga: Blood, Sweat and Tears

• Passport
• Police Verification for Passport
• Paid INR 10,000

NOTE: This is a long post by internet standards! :)
A little background information: I have no domicile in India. My father was in the Navy and we moved around as far back as I can remember, and I could have renewed my passport with considerably less effort had I applied before he retired.
I realized that my old passport had expired around June 2010 and while I spent my winter break from college in Bangalore, I made a few inquiries. I needed one within the next 6 months in order to be able to undertake an internship abroad. Although I study at the National Institute of Technology in Warangal, I am from Bangalore, at least to the extent I was born there and have a great deal of family in the city.
That December, I put together all the requisite paperwork as stated on the website and kept the appointment I had made on their rather impressive looking website only to find that the residence proof could be in my father's name alone and the multiple proofs I had int he form of my grandfather's bills and IDs were inadequate to prove- well I'm not quite sure what it was that I needed to prove: I had a passport, I just needed to have it renewed. When I found this out, I had cleared four, mind you FOUR levels within their processing system, and was at the final step, sitting in the Passport Officer's cabin. After a wait that had lasted over five hours, and having travelled all the way from college, I was devastated. Naturally, I bawled my eyes out. I reckon the staff didn't expect it in the least. They were very solicitous, and the Passport Officer put me in touch with a colleague in the Hyderabad office, telling me I had a better chance there.

Temporarily mollified, I returned to start afresh in Hyderabad, paperwork in tow, with documents that proved my enrollment at NITW hoping that they would be sufficient to make me a domicile of the Andhra region. The passport office at Hyderabad, in the early hours of the morning was rude shock- a queue stretching for over a kilometer, with people who had allegedly been waiting there for over three days, sleeping on the street for fear of losing their place in the line. As I found out later, most of the people in the queue were men who had been put there by 'agents', who make up huge numbers outside that office and manage to serve the dual purpose of getting their pockets filled and encouraging people to turn their way when applying for a passport.

So far, this had been a three month ordeal, and I was only getting my first glimpse of the soul-sucking bureaucracy this country is in the unique position to birth and nurture, the endless appetite it has for the time and money of its people.

i took the easy route thereafter. Got a tatkal passport through an agent in Hyderabad. I got my passport in 25 days. I paid 9,500 in cold cash, but it was worth every penny. I also paid the local Passport Verification Officer in Warangal, a large, repulsive, swarthy man, who looked me up and down like he was admiring a good steak. It really took every ounce of my will not to smack his face, but really, I just didn't want to touch him. I tolerated his chatting, answered his intrusive questions. When he asked for the money, I ran around the hostel I live in for about a half hour, trying to borrow and managed to scrape together the 500 he wanted. While I went begging in the 40 degree heat I cheered up imagining his head exploding in technicolour, 3D, up close. I wanted to scream at him, I didn't want to feel powerless, but I can see that that's what they want. They want you to bow, to grovel, to feel that they hold something that is important to you. Thanks to these fine examples of fleas, not men, I now have exceptional insight into the psychology of power.

So yeah, I paid a bribe and there's no part of me that understands how that's okay. It's not- it's just fundamentally wrong. I'm 21, disillusioned, and getting the **********out of this country. Thanks for the passport!