The Broken Appointment System In Indian PSKs (Passport Seva Kendra)s

7am in the morning is a bit too early for me to be awake (as I sleep quite late). And writing a blog on top as early is even rarer (actually first). But I got to write this discussing the situation prompted this.

My parents passports are expiring in September and we wanted to renew them. First, it’s been a long time I have dealt with any govt organization in India. Few months back when I was in India I did some research on how to renew for passports and was pleasantly surprised of the online application filling and appointment system.

While the online process is a boon for people like me, it also has a disadvantage for people who don’t know how to operate the computers or the internet, like my parents. So, the plan was  that they would take the appointment when my sister visits them (I came to know that the appointment can’t be taken much in advance). My sister is currently visiting them and I thought it’s just a matter of time to take the appointment. But yesterday I got an email and she said we have to take the appointment at 7:30pm and we have powercut at that time. Now I am not going to make this post about the power problems in India. Suffice it to say, it’s a genuine problem and I don’t know what people can do about powercuts when the govt itself is increasingly providing facilities requiring computers and internet.

I said I can help take the appointment. That’s how I got up at 7:00 am (a little earlier actually) and got on to the system and called my sister. Then two things happened. First, I got a message telling me that I need to get into the system tomorrow at 7:30pm without any indication that the slots are over and hence I need to do that (otherwise, one can easily think it’s broken or no clue what went wrong). Second, apparently the power was there and my sister was logged in prior to me but her session got terminated because I got in.

I was surprised that we couldn’t get an appointment slot within 3 minutes of the window. I then did a search and to my surprise and horror I read all kinds of stories where people have been trying for 2 months!

Whenever there is an inefficient system, there are going to be people trying to make money out of that. So, in the few blogs where people provided suggestions on how to secure an appointment, there were many comments where the poor mortals explained how they are having difficulty getting an appointment. And then there are these travel agents or someone who are offering “passport appointment booking” services for a fee of 200 to 400 Rs. Most likely these people are using some scripts or something like that and exhausting the slots.

There is also a news article Online passport appointments snapped up in 15 minutes. In that article a govt official was stating that there is a 35% absent rate. Sure, what do you they expect? You expect people far away to book the appointment for the next day that too almost in the night and show up next day? It may or may not be practically feasible.

Another concern I have is, we need to renew 3 passports as a family (my dad, mom and sister). But the appointment system allows taking appointment for 1 person at a time. If it gets exhausted so fast, does it mean the family has to go 3 times? I don’t know for sure till I see the subsequent appointment screens if they have an option to indicate that it’s for a family of 3 people.

Anyway, the reason why the situation is like this is because someone responsible for coming up with a process didn’t do a good job. Here is how the system should have been designed.

1) It should be possible to book the appointments at any time of the day. It is likely that they allotted different time slots for each PSK to reduce load on the system. But by creating this windows and difficulty to make an appointment, they are actually creating unnecessary load (look at all the forums and tips about repeatedly trying, opening multiple tabs etc).

2) It should be possible to book an appointment for up to a month or so. If Indian Railways can support for up to 3 or 4 months in advance, I am sure the PSKs can sure do it.

3) Allow people to cancel an appointment 3 days in advance if they can’t make it. But people can abuse this unless they are charged some money and they need to forgo full or a part of it. Time is money. So, another option is, if someone cancels an appointment, then do not allow them to take appointment for the next N days (N can be 15 or 30 or something reasonable which discourages people to cancel unless there is a very valid reason).

Anyway, I am not sure how long it’s going to take for us to secure an appointment but the current system is very broken IMHO.

Update 1: The next day my sister tried it again and was ready to hit the button exactly on the spot. It got submitted but we had to wait and wait and wait and wait for the response that I ended my phone call and let her continue. Later I came to know that after almost 20 minutes on that screen the session timed out! So much for being ready.

Change of plans. We decided to go with the local agent who did the initial passport 10 yrs back when this system was not in place. Apparently they can get it done (charging of course), I don’t know how. Once my parents go and get the passport, I will update this further on how exactly it worked.

Update: Today I heard they got the passports. Some local travel agent told them to go there on a specific day, no particular time. It’s about 3 hrs from where we live and they went by taxi, reached there before 11am and submitted the documents. They came back and in few weeks the police came for verification and finally today I heard they got the passports.