Doorstep Delivery of Services give an opportunity to AAP Govt to learn and change the system

Recently, I was disappointed when I read the news about refusal of doorstep delivery of services by some people. Some called the helpline, booked the appointment but did not meet the officer at the given time and place. I kept thinking about the situation and came up with two possible explanations for the happenings:

Opposition parties have an intention to make this one-of-its-kind policy unsuccessful. Looking at incidents from the past, this looks possible. It took 2-3 years for Delhi Govt to implement this project. Once rejected by LG office, project files were being transferred from one department to another. Since the project has finally started, such politically motivated blockages should not last long as there might be a limited number of people fooling around with the scheme. Just a couple more days and the disruption should die down.
The second reasoning sounds more promising to me. I believe our attitude as Indians and social life in general is the reason that 72 people booked an appointment (in first 2 days) and did not show up (or refused the services) at the time of appointment. Let me elaborate it more.

We are not used to doing usual paper works based on appointments. We like to go to banks and govt offices and stand there in lines for hours on end. This should be OK if it does not pose a major problem to the people involved. However, it somehow instills a major sense of getting used to the postponement of things. Time and effort, that could have been invested for something useful, is wasted on a huge scale. Life gets lazy and monotonous. I, as a student, struggled with this attitude, when I found it difficult to commit to meetings or classes scheduled for a given time. It is embarrassing when you reach to a meeting a minute late and all the other participants are already there. Initially, I found it hard to call a bank or govt office to book an appointment. I got used to the process gradually. I have seen other people struggling with similar issue.

Another reason might be due to the presence of large families in India where many people are available for a certain job. Allocation of duties is not always clearly defined. So, there might be a situation that two or three different family members called the helpline and booked an appointment for the same service. This leads to refusal of services by some of the duplicate callers.

At this point, I don’t feel bad about wastage of govt money and officers’ time. I believe it will take some time for things to set in place and for people to adapt to the process. As a student from India starting a new life in Canada, it took me more than 6 months to get used to the system here where all the departments work on the basis of pre-scheduled appointments. Doorstep delivery of services is the only (may be certain services in hospitals too) time-bound service in Delhi.

Government is losing some money in appointments missed by some of the costumers. I see this as an investment by the government to teach people the methods of time-bound and appointment-based services. We might see decreased number of queues and less wastage of time in future.

Following two videos demonstrate the process of doorstep delivery of services.