Going on a power trip, outside Mumbai

If there's a way to get things done in a power utility office, Sanchari B would like a quick primer. Her experience the last time was far from satisfactory

In an office forgotten by time and the Government of India. Here, in a small room that seems 150 years old -- with mouldy walls, endless racks of dusty files and rickety desks -- sit some of the most powerful men of Navi Mumbai. These men lord it over the mammoth township located on the outskirts of the island city of Mumbai.
 
This is not the office of a political party, or of the collector, or the police department. This deceptively humble office belongs to the mighty Maharashtra State Electricity Board.
 
I had my first encounter with the MSEB's ways a month after I bought a flat in Navi Mumbai. I had to visit the office to get the electric meter transferred from the seller to me, the new owner.
 
So one fine day, I found myself inside the decrepit room in one of Mumbai's far-flung suburbs. The officials behind the counters pored over papers that seemed to have been handed down personally by Lord Mountbatten before he left India, while some men and women stood in a silent queue in front of them, looking very much like a group of devotees waiting for the prasadam from the head priest.
 
I was back within a week, the 8-page or so of the requisite form duly filled, with all the documents and signatures in place, confident that this would be the last trip I would have to make to this office. Oh, how naive I was.
 
This time, the presiding deity, also known as the chief officer, actually gave me two minutes of his very valuable time (between lunch time and tea break), to tell me that I needed to get the electric meter checked by an MSEB engineer. That engineer could be found in another office some 30 minutes away, and that office had shut for the day.
 
So next week, I was at yet another MSEB outlet with a serious identity crisis; this one looked like a kitchenette had metamorphosed into an office. I interrupted three men who were engaged in an important discussion about a missing stapler, and asked them about meter verification.
 
"Come back tomorrow morning, we'll finish the verification by today evening," one of them said.
 
Since one day seemed too good to be true, even to my then relatively-less-cynical reasonably-optimistic frame of mind, I returned a safe four days later to reclaim my painstakingly complied and filled out form.
 
The office was shut. The babus had gone out for lunch, I was told. At 12 noon, in an office that pulls up the shutters at 10 am, all the officials were out lunching two hours later. When I came back at 2.30 pm, the office was still shut. The same old steel lock greeted me at 4.30 pm.
 
"Maybe they won't come back today. Sometimes, they don't," said the neighbourhood grocer.
 
So I came back the next day, hoping that the trio had come back from their lunch which had now lasted for one-and-a-half days. They hadn't.
 
On my third outing, I finally managed to find the engineer and his cronies in their office. Only, my form hadn't been verified, though a week had gone by. "But I was told that it will take only a day," I said apoplectically.
 
The man dismissed me, and my form, with a wave of his hand. "It will take a few more days," he said coldly, probably already planning his next two-day-long lunch.
 
Another week down, I went back to the MSEB office, bracing myself for yet another encounter of the inefficient kind. But their answer this time rendered me speechless -- the verification, apparently, had to be done at the first office itself.
 
I didn't bother asking why they had wasted so much of my time by leading me on a wild engineer chase. I snatched my form from their hands and rushed to the other office which, given my luck, might shut by noon or something.
 
Of course, the MSEB officers in Nerul had no idea why I had been sent back to them, incomplete form in tow.
 
"They asked you to come to us? That is highly unlikely…hmmm…highly unlikely," said an official, scanning the form up and down, as if it would give him the answers to this and more unanswered questions about the universe.
 
'But they DID," I said vehemently, "I am not making it up."
 
"I didn't say you were, but hmmm…" he said, looking for divine inspiration in the form, while I wondered whether the distance between me and him was too much to reach over and smite him one.
 
"You have to talk to the presiding deity. Only he can help you out with this," he said, waving at the empty throne/chair PD occupied the few times he was found in the office.
 
When queried on when PD would be back, the official looked suitably miffed. "How will I know? I don't keep track of his movements. But he won't come today. It's already 3 pm," he said.
 
Another week and another visit to the office that was like a second home to me now, yet no signs of PD.  "He usually comes a little late," said the peon to console me. A little late? It was 2 pm on a working day, in an office which shuts at 5 pm.
 
"Maybe he has some other work," the man added hastily. Sure he did. PD was busy, probably saving the world or something, for he wasn't there even when I made my nth visit to the office next week
 
Determined to follow Mahatma Gandhi's ideology of do-or-die, or in this case get-a-sign-or-kill-someone, I decided to hold a dharna at the office next week, and refuse to budge from there till I got a darshan of PD.
 
And arrive he did, in style, about five hours late. Glancing cursorily at me and the bunch of people who had waited for hours to get a glimpse of him to avail a service that they had paid for, he said dismissively, "Aaj bahut kaam pending hai. Aaj kuch nahi hoga. Aap log baad mein aayie." 
 
I wondered whether to play the damsel-in-distress by breaking into tears or fling myself at his feet and plead for his signature on my file.
 
And then, help came from an unexpected quarter. An elderly man, who I had spotted on my earlier visits to the office, and who had seemed resigned to spending his remaining years on earth here, suddenly had an 'Incredible Hulk' moment.
 
'DOES ANYONE IN THIS OFFICE WORK?" he roared, flinging the bunch of papers he had been holding patiently so far, on PD's desk. As the officials collectively gasped and PD visibly shrank, the waiting citizens looked at him with reverence and wondered whether to join the revolution.
 
"For the last for months, you guys have made me run around for one sign, ONE SIGN," he bellowed in a voice that reverberated around the sooty walls of the office.
 
The peon was the first one to regain his composure. He ran to the aggrieved man with a glass of water, while PD shakily got up from his desk and made his way to where the elderly man had plonked himself on a chair. As he passed me and the other darshan seekers, he said in a resigned voice, "You can get your form signed in that office," pointing to a smaller room, which warned against unauthorised entry.
 
The man in that office signed my form without even glancing at it. Why, if help was so close at hand, did it cost me some 50 visits, five kilos (thanks to the running around) and almost three months to get something this simple done!

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

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