Bureaucracy Madness

After two bribes paid, 5 trips to the FRO, 3 trips to the police office, 3 trips to copy my documents, I have finally received my residence permit. The only problem is that they only issue the permit until September, because they require a Bonafide certificate from my department at the University, which of course I can't get until classes begin. All of this means I get to start the entire process over again, submitting paperwork to a ridiculous amount of officers. I cannot for the life of me figure out where all of this paper goes and if it will ever be looked at ever again.

Now for some further explanation on the bribes. With a student visa, you are given 14 days form the date of arrival to submit your final "A" form for approval. The 14 days is absolutely ridiculous considering that in order to submit this form, you must have found a place to live, have received a copy of the C form on arrival from your hostel, have a copy of the notarized lease agreement, along with a bunch of other forms and pictures and the most important part being a letter from the police office certifying that I am actually living at the address I have on my application.

Now the police are quite aware of this little 14 day rule, and almost everyone will only be ready to go to the police station with the lease agreement until close to the 14 day limit. The fine for being late is $30, which is ridiculous. The police more or less told us that it would be at least two days until they could "verify" that I lived in my flat (by stamping my application basically) even though I only had one day left to submit my final application to the foreigner's registration office. This is where the bribe came in. We slipped 200 rupees under the first page of my application to the first officer who stamped my front page of the documents, which allowed me to move to the back where they would take all the documents to issue my permit. These guys wanted 500 rupees, which I angrily paid. In the end I paid the bribe which only ended up being $12 rather than the fine of $30, but the whole thing was frustrating and incredibly inefficient. It is amazing that the remnants of Nehru's vision of the government's reach still looms large today here at the ground level.

In the end I handed in everything in on the 14th day, and the late fee was avoided, but I am already dreading the return to these offices in a few weeks time to repeat the entire process to extend my permit and visa so I can continue to travel in December once classes end. 

That is my rant for the day! Everyone reading this is probably extremely confused, my apologies for that, I honestly don't think it could be explained in any simple way.