The Horror That New e-Passport Site Has Been
To
Dear Dr Manmohan Singh,
Prime Minister of India.
I have been trying to renew my passport for the last one month. I could not have imagined the ordeal that I would go through, when I first started. First off the official Government of India site redirects you to a dead link for Chandigarh passport office. Can you imagine it says the DNS record is not found? After doing some research and a trip to the Chandigarh passport office I got to know the changed URL to the new site. When I opened that site to my horror I found out that the site uses https with an invalid certificate. How much does it take to buy a valid cert when they are wasting Crores on such stupid endeavours.
Anyhow I managed to register myself and the whole site experience looked like a college project to me. Although it has been designed by the topmost IT company of this country. The frustrated experience included frequent page timeouts and such bad layout that is beyond belief. After I submitted my filled form, I tried to create an appointment. The site said that all the available slots for the day are filled and I need to choose another date. To my astonishment there was no date field to choose another date. After wasting some more days trying to create an appointment, I finally called the toll free number. There I got to know the voodoo magic for booking an appointment. At 8AM they open the booking slots for the day. You have to be lucky to get the few slots opened for that day.
I have been trying to do exactly that for the last few days. At sharp 8AM when there are probably hundreds of people like me trying to get the few slots, the site becomes practically unresponsive. Every single page times out and after multiple reloads you move from one step to next to find out that the slot has already been taken. At this point I am so fed up and have started to like the previous system of standing in the queue for 4 hours to get an audience with the Passport Gods. At least there was a guarantee!
Dear Dr Singh, we are one of the most taxed countries and it just saddens me to no extent to see this money going waste like this. Please stop this non-sense of spending public money in the name of improving citizen facilities and doing the most shoddy job. Had this system been reviewed by some decent industry professionals, it would not have been allowed to go public.
Regards,
Amit.
