Bangalore - LPG related Document submission - Herculean Task completed

A herculean task finally completed.

As you may be aware already, Karnataka government had asked all LPG (Indane, HP and Bharat only) subscribers in the state to submit certain documents as part of an attempt to weed-out illegal subscribers. It was told that failure to do so may result in suspension of gas services. The documents required are:

1. Copy of latest Electricity Bill of the house in which the subscriber is staying currently,

2. Copy of Ration card (if available)

3. Copy of latest gas receipt.

 

Looks good so far. But the real trouble starts when you try to use any of the four modes of submission outlined in the government notification.

Here are the modes of submission

1. Personally submit the documents at the gas agency office
2. Send it by post or courier to the office of the concerned officer.
3. Fax -  to the same office as above
4. Upload scanned copies on the web-site of the department.

 

Standing in the serpentine queue at the Gas Agency office was not an option for me. Sending by Fax does not assure receipt by the correct person. Sending by Post / courier also has the same risk. That leaves Web-upload as the only option.

 

The Department of Food, Civil Supplies & Consumer Affairs, Government of Karnataka web-site is a classic example of how poorly designed government web-sites are. A link at the home-page of the web-site will take you to the page for uploading the documents. There are ridiculous restrictions imposed on the upload – the file size can not be more than 150KB. File format has to be JPEG or GIF only. After filling in the Gas Consumer No, Electricity Bill details and Ration card details, when you start uploading the files, you will see stars in the day. The web-site simply refuses to accept the document throwing up arcane confusing unintuitive errors. After attempting to upload repeatedly for couple of hours, I gave up and called the help-line mentioned. After half-a-dozen attempts my call was answered – and I was told that the server is "down". I gave up and decided to use the other method – post. I had to do something about it since the last day was 9-FEB-2011.  So I took copies of the documents and sent it by courier to the address mentioned.

 

Next day I came to know from a colleague that the web-site is working and he has used it to upload his documents successfully.. The web-site was expected to generate an acknowledgement receipt after successful upload. Its always good to get some reference number, so I decided to give it another try.

 

But as we all know, government web-sites will forever continue to top the list of poorly designed web-sites. After filling in all the relevant details I tried to upload the scan copies of documents which I had prepared beforehand. It gave some error "Insertion failed – check data JPEG/GIF only". I spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out whats wrong. I tried various versions of files with different file sizes – all below 150KB. But none would go through. Then finally I discussed with my colleague and we tried to do the same from his machine with few variations. Still we got the same error. Fortunately my colleague pointed out that the error could be because of long file name. We reduced the file name to 8-10 chars and bingo ! the files sailed through. If only the stupid web-site had flashed a suitable error saying "file name too long" or something, I would have so much time!!

 

Finally I let out a sigh of relief when I got an acknowledgement from the web-site.

 

An utterly chaotic governance with equally chaotic processes and systems….