To transport two bikes across the country, Shahwar must navigate a nexus of middleman and babus...

Recently, I found myself entangled in a nexus of middlemen and government officials that was exasperating to say the least. The middleman rules a large part of our lives, simply because our system allows him to. In a day and age when time is one of our most valuable resources, unfortunately, we have to rely on middlemen to get things done in a timely manner when dealing with our government agencies. I had to transport two bikes across the country by train, and the railways have a strange classification when it comes to bike transportation. They have two slots – one for 250cc bikes and another for 350cc bikes. The 250cc bikes are categorised as 150 kilos and the 350cc bikes (termed as a ‘Bullet’ bike) are classified as 400 kilos bikes. There’s nothing above 350cc’s in their rule book. The bikes I wanted to book were of the 800cc category – you’ll see them featured elsewhere in this issue. When I wrote 800cc in the booking form, the ‘wise’ and ‘experienced’ bespectacled booking clerk gave me a look that clearly indicated that he thought I was an idiot to have written ‘800cc.’ He refused to believe that a bike could have quite such a voluminous engine capacity. I requested him to come and have a look at the bikes in the booking yard. He decided to open his rulebook instead, and sure enough he couldn’t find any guidelines that said anything about an 800cc bike. Like the sage he pretended to be, he calmly asked me to come back the next day. I was desperate, as I absolutely had to book the bike that day itself. I was on a tight schedule, and couldn’t afford a delay of even 24 hours. No amount of pleading could make him look at an alternate means to book the bikes. A hawk-eyed man was watching this drama unfold – and as I moved away from the window, he made his move. He took me to a corner of the booking yard, and made a great show of how the ‘Sarkari babus’ didn’t understand the needs of the common man. So, he says he can get the bikes booked onto the train I wanted – but, of course, it would cost a ‘little’ extra! He had a short conference with the same clerk and came back grinning from ear-to-ear, and asked me to fill the form again – which I did in exactly the same manner as I had done before. He made a great show of how he had managed to convince the officer to book my bikes. He said that each bike would cost me Rs. 16,000, and this was excluding the packaging charges. Three solid wasted hours of moving from window-to-window, speaking to one babu after the other, while leafing through antiquated rulebooks, had gotten on my nerves to the point that I agreed to his demand. When the receipt was handed over, I noticed that it said `6,500 for each bike. Almost 10,000 extra for each bike was the cost of our bureaucracy – so, daylight robbery in other words. And, obviously, that didn’t take care of everything. The loaders wanted another two grand to ensure that the bikes were loaded properly – and on the same train. When I refused to pay, they put the bikes in two different trains, and it was another wasted day as I had to collect the bikes on two separate occasions. It’s a racket, and a thriving one at that. The extra money greases a lot of palms of course – and each one ensures that regular travellers and citizens are harassed to a point where they have to resort to middlemen to get their work done. The system has been twisted in such a manner that the common man ends up in a labyrinth – and that’s when the fixer plays guardian angle. It works every time. I’m not sure how I should go about it the next time I need to book a bike. The rulebook is of no use of course, but it’s high time that we broke this unholy nexus. The only thing we can do is collectively hope that our government is truly committed to the Swachh Bharat movement in every sense, and it isn’t merely PR speak...