These have been harrowing times for those who have lost their loved ones. My parents followed each other into the nether world in a gap of five weeks. My math-loving father died of natural reasons such as old age in June and post-Covid complications claimed my mother in July. Of course, these are personal tragedies, and we often want our parents to be around as parents forever, but alas that is not to be. They grow old, frail, remind us of their vulnerabilities and pass on. During this pandemic, many families have lost very young people, who were supporting structures of their families. Children have become orphans and have been left to the mercy of fate. Is there something the well-off people can do for them? I am glad to know some organisations and a part of the government are working in tandem to ensure some fates are rescued for a considerably better future.
So, coming back to my own case, as a result of my parents’ death, I had to apply and get some records and documents from government offices such as a survivors’ certificate, etc. Thanks to the fact that I live on the outskirts of the royal city of Mysuru, my locality comes under a Nada Kacheri in a village about 16 km away from where I live. The physical distance isn’t too much owing to the fact that the drive to the village is a decent one with less traffic and greenery all along the way. That, however, is not the issue here.
We, the pampered bourgeois middle class who may sneer at the caste system (when it doesn’t serve us, of course), but enjoy our pet bubbles of gated communities dread at the sight of government offices. Because those are the places where corporate outlooks don’t work and a common villager knows the system much better than a lot of us. Because the tenacity shown by villagers and middlemen making ‘govt processes easy for our delicate skins’ probably astonishes us and diminishes our endorphins-through-trekking kind of adventure-seeking. IMO, having roamed quite a few government offices in my career as a journalist, nothing is more endorphin-inducing than a job completed (read document secured) from a government office. No, I am not complaining against the people or administration there. We, the middle class detest government offices as much as we detest government ANYTHING — hospitals being another one — and that explains the low voter turnout in urban areas (in a rather sweeping conclusion, if you insist). We are comfortable in luxe trains, steely-glassy airports. But a bus stand or government office? Nah!
Today, a lot of things have been streamlined through e-governance. With all due respect to the efforts that have gone in, I would still like to draw our attention towards the offices and banks in villages that are teeming mostly with men.
A pandemic has rendered us defenceless. A lot of people have died. There is a surge in demand for property-related work, account transfers to be made, compensations to be given owing to Covid-related deaths. And this is a particularly good time that the middlemen have sprung up again. Right from securing death certificates to ensuring khata transfers, men are keeping the offices busy. I am not trying to make villains out of them. But why are these offices/procedures so alien to women? At any given point of time, to about 40 men in a government office waiting for hours to submit an application, there are probably less than three women in the same queue — deeply conscious of their presence and waiting to jump out from there at the first nanosecond of getting an opportunity to do so. It is time to look at addressing this space where women either hesitate to access the system or the system isn’t conducive for them to access. Decades ago, every family had a story to tell about how their properties were usurped by relatives because the vulnerable ones didn’t know better. Looks like we are back at the same place. The pandemic has hit women in more ways than one. The virus may die out, but the economic repercussions will be felt by many generations.
(The author is a journalist deeply seeped into the theatre of (&) politics.)