Passports, Phone Bills and Bureaucrats

For almost ten years I've marveled at the pleasant ideosyncraces of India's bureaucracy, but it wasn't until today that I finally realized that I will never truly penetrate very far into the government mindset. This morning Padma, her mother and I went to our local Hyundai dealership to purchase our first car in India, laid down a cash for the down payment and set up a plan for picking it up in the next few days. Everything seemed in order until the dealer told us to fill out a set of forms that would allow us to register the car in our names. This shouldn't have been a problem. We've registered several motorcycles in the country, have a valid lease, photos, and resident status, but the dealer balked when we proposed to use our government issued Person of Indian Origin (PIO) cards as proof of identity.

The PIO card is the Indian equivalent of an American green card and gives the bearer the same basic rights as a citizen minus voting privledges and the ability to acquire vast tracks of farmland. It looks just like a passport and allows us to come and go from the country as we please. I qualify as a PIO because of my wife, which is sort of funny, but another story entirely.

The dealer looked at our cards and said that it didn't prove our identity and demanded that we produce something a little more authentic. Did we have a ration card? No. How about an Indian driver's license with our local address on it? No. We suggested that we show our lease to prove our address. That wouldn't work either.

"Well, how about a phone bill?", he asked.

Yes, that's right. He asked if we had a phone bill after rejecting our passports and apartment lease as valid identification.

Padma fished through a a sheif of papers and produced a slightly over-due phone bill from AirTel. The dealer smiled, clapped his hands, and said that this would prove who we were nicely.

At this moment I wish there had been a camera on me because I'm sure that my jaw dropped.

In order to get a Person of Indian Origin card person needs to fly to an Indian consulate in another nation, produce thirty different documents attesting to Indian heritage, a dozen passport sized photographs and an Interpol security check. To hook up a land line phone all you have to do is show up at an AirTel office with a passport sized photo, and an address where you want to connect the phone service.

While in theory the AirTel bill does say who we are, it is by no means as rigorous a form of identification as a triple checked ID issued at an Indian consulate. Nor is it as obvious a proof of residence as an active rental agreement. Yet the dealer insisted that the Regional Transportation Office (RTO) wouldn't accept our government issued documents, and would rather rely on a telephone company to verify identity.

While this works out for us perfectly well, we will have the car by the middle of next week, this experience shows me that there is something deeply wrong with the way the Indian government chooses to track it's population. Since when should private carriers bear the burden of censusing the population? Shouldn't the government accept it's own IDs? If the document is good enough to let you in and out of the country, shouldn't it be enough to register a car?