Chennai at the Crossroads

10. Government, Good and Bad

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The vignettes of Chennai life that I have penned so far juxtapose its dynamic progress with its less pleasant problems. I have striven to give the narrative some balance. And tough as it is, I will attempt to dole out the same even-handed treatment in discussing the workings of the government in Chennai and Tamil Nadu. Whether it’s the courts, the municipal government, or state politics, the process is cumbersome, bureaucratic, sometimes corrupt, and in sharp contrast to the dynamism of the private sector. At the same time, especially in the case of government utilities, I have to commend the city and state for the valiant attempts to cope with the burgeoning population and bring the city and state administrations into the twenty-first century.

Let me begin with the Chennai Corporation and the State Government . In many ways, the local government is doing its best to get into the 21’st Century. Its website, for example, is well  laid out, its departments are getting computerized, and it is doing a heroic job of dealing with the city’s exploding needs. Despite these improvements, however, there is no question that it is more cumbersome to deal with the public sector than with private company.

A good example is BSNL, the government-owned telephone authority, otherwise known as Chennai Telephones. Last year, when my mother moved down the street, I tried to get her telephone transferred to her new residence. I was then treated to a series of encounters that would have been amusing had they not been so frustrating, involving multiple trips to various Chennai telephone offices. The main difficulty arose from the fact that the telephone was still in my late father’s name. It took a physical trip to the main Chennai Telephones Administration building to discover that to transfer the phone connection, we were required to deliver his death certificate and various other papers to some senior official. I subsequently discovered the appropriate instructions on the telephone company website and reproduce them for the reader:

“Legal Heir Transfer:

This transfer is after the death of a subscriber. In case the subscriber has left a Will in favour of a person, the telephone will be transferred to his name. In case the Will contains more than one person, the telephone can be transferred to any one person by mutual consent by others. In the absence of a Will, the telephone will be transferred to the widow / widower of the deceased or otherwise to the legal heir of the successor. In this case, a copy of the legal heir certificate, a copy of the death certificate and no objection certificate from other legal heirs and an affidavit on Rs.10/- non-judicial stamp paper are to be submitted. If the telephone is transferred to the widow/widower, no objection certificate from the other heirs is not required.”

BSNL Website

Goodness gracious - wills, death certificates, legal heirship certificates, no-objection certificates (not required in our case), affidavits, and yes, something called “non-judicial stamp paper”! (More on this stamp paper later). All this to transfer a telephone number. In contrast, anyone can get a new cellular connection and phone from one of Chennai’s private providers in just a few minutes. To understand the origin of these draconian requirements, one has to go back a few decades, to when the government was the monopoly provider of telephone service and there was a multi-year waiting period for a new telephone connection. Back then, people would beg, borrow or steal (and judging by the requirements above, kill off their relatives if necessary) for a telephone connection. Today, most of the backlog has been cleared, but the suspicious rules spawned back then are apparently still in force.

Returning two hours later, I found the official just arriving at work. Resisting the temptation to ask why he was not at work until 11 am, I handed him all the paperwork, including the death certificate, the legal heirship certificate, the letter, etc. etc. Inspecting it and looking me over, he said to me solemnly that this was a very serious matter. “In what sense?” I asked, wondering if he was passing on his condolences. “Your father”, he replied accusingly, “has been deceased since 2002, yet you are bringing me the paperwork for the transfer only now?” I explained that although my mother was entitled to keep the phone connection per BSNL rules, she did not know the procedure for changing over the names, and had been unable to discover how to do so on the phone. Neither was she in a position to run around the city collecting paperwork and meeting people simply to change the name in the database.

Further, I pointed out, she had been paying all the bills on time so the phone company had suffered no loss as a result. So when could we expect the name change to be effected?  “We will see”, he said, non-committally. I decided on a different tack. If you are not able to transfer the phone, you are welcome to discontinue the service, I told him. I will simply get my mother a mobile phone. Apparently convinced at last that mine was a legitimate request, he mumbled that they would process the paperwork and that the local exchange would receive it in “due course”.  When I pressed him for the timing he said  “Two weeks to a month. We have to follow all the proper procedures.” This was, in fact not the end of the story, but I will spare the reader details of one more trip to headquarters and two more to the local exchange office.

Despite these types of inefficiencies in the public sector, there are other areas where they have done a very good job. For example the Tamil Nadu Government leads the country in making available an enormous amount of useful material and services online on their website (see references). One can now set up automatic bill pay for most types of utility bills in Chennai. Many forms are available online. When I visited the local electricity board counter to try to prepay the bill for a few months (don’t even ask about that experience), I discovered that despite the dingy surroundings, the actual subscriber database and bill pay system was in fact completely computerized. ( Citizens without phones can use one of the ubiquitous “STD/ISD/PCO” booths to make local and long distance phone calls, as pictured above)

The most impressive aspects of the public sector in Tamil Nadu, however, are those that are not visible. It has been no easy task to service a city with a metropolitan area population of almost 7 million, and which is literally exploding. Just three decades ago, the services of the city apparently could not cope. Electricity power cuts were common, it took years to get a telephone connection, and months to get other types of utility connections. Today most of these problems are gone or diminished. Take telephone service, the very department that I just finished excoriating. Just 15 years ago, the service was extremely balky with rotary dials, old-fashioned pulse dialing only, a lot of misrouted calls, busy signals, and an overloaded network. Today the service is far more reliable, includes data, cellular and touch tone land line services, and waiting times and bureaucracy, despite my specific experience, have indeed been reduced. Broadband services were launched in 2005. Meantime, BSNL is an extremely profitable public sector company, with annual profits of $2.2 billion nationwide, second only to the natural resources agencies. 

Similarly the government has tried hard to keep up with the demand for municipal water services. The main sources of public water supply in the city are the three reservoirs - Poondi, Redhills and Cholavaram. Losses due to evaporation from the reservoirs result in the effective availability being lower than the storage. The other major resource is groundwater from the well fields in the Araniar-Kortaliyar basin and the southern coastal aquifer, and a large number of wells and tubewells spread all across the city.

Over-extraction of groundwater in the north western coastal belt resulted in a rapid ingress of seawater, which extended from 3 km inshore in 1969 to 7 km in 1983 and 9 km in 1987. Groundwater levels within the city also fell and brackish water began to appear even in localities which earlier had good quality groundwater sources. Over the next two decades, and despite the government’s best efforts, Chennai will face a major water supply crisis, as indicated in the chart. To close at least a part of the gap, rain water harvesting is being promoted throughout the city, and an emergency project was completed in 2005 to draw, purify, and transport 190 million litres/day from the Veeranam lake in Cuddalore district. Many more efforts in this direction, along with efforts from the private sector will be needed to close the alarming gap that has opened up between supply and demand. My visit in August 2007, however, was a happy one with respect to water availability: Plentiful rains this year made sure that Chennai had, if anything, a surfeit of water and the weather was pleasant from the cooling effect of the rains.

I will end with the legal system. My brush with the courts began when my father passed away in August 2002, and we found that we needed to get a so-called “Succession Certificate”  from the Madras High Court, naming my mother and I as beneficiaries. Five years later, the saga still continues. Although the paperwork was all there, the situation was as straightforward as can be ( I was an only child), and there were no disputes, we are yet to obtain the certificate. Admittedly, it took us two years to figure out how to file the appropriate legal papers. But even so, three years to get a completely routine matter completed is excessive by any standard.

I have since discovered that I should not have been surprised. When we filed our papers, they joined a queue of  over twenty million pending cases before Indian courts on matters large and small at the end of 2002. Since then, according to the Hindu, the number of cases has risen to about 30 million (about 3 million in the country’s 21 high courts and the remaining in lower courts). Madras High Court, where my papers were filed, had 406,958 cases pending as of May 23, 2007.

Along with trips to see my lawyer each time I visit Chennai - on this occasion, I went to see him three times – my efforts involved frustrating hunts all over the city in search of elusive species called stamp paper (pictured to the left). This sometimes difficult-to-find legal paper, which was mentioned earlier in the context of the BSNL requirements,  has to be used for almost all official affidavits and certifications, of which we needed several. Recently, my lawyer presented me a simple one-paragraph affidavit typed across five sheets of paper, and asked my mother to affix signatures at the bottom of each page. The reason was that he had gone unsuccessfully in search of the required Rs. 100/- denominated stamp paper. Unable to find any, and having had to settle for five Rs. 20/- denominations instead, he was forced to stretch the affidavit to fit on five sheets instead of one!

But let me end with what I hope is good news. Finally, after three years, our lawyer informed me that our case is going to be heard in the last week of August, and with luck, our  court papers will be issued in September 2007.

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