Running around for one and half year to get my ration card

“Just wanted to say, that we at Goa Civic and Consumer Action Network (GOACAN) are promoting the idea that if you do not take any grains from the ration shop or kerosene from the authorized dealer, then there is no need to have a ration card. This is also not the only document to prove your residency. Perhaps you would like to comment on it,” wrote my neighbor and consumer activist Lorna Fernandes in an email send to me in the month of December last year.

That was the activist view. The ground reality was quite different. This is what I discovered painfully for the last one and half year when the talathi of Cuncolim misplaced our ration card and we had to make endless rounds to the government offices involving a lot of paper work, including  sworn affadavits to get back the ration card.

My first stop was at the doors steps of a nationalized bank in Margao. The bank official insisted from my mother a xerox copy of the ration card, over and above the electoral card and the senior citizen card issued by Directorate of Social Welfare.

Fortunately, I had an old Xerox copy and although he insisted on seeing the original electoral card, he did not harp on the original ration card and the matter rested there. But that was not easily done. It was  only when I created scene and playing the Goenkar card to the bank customers was a master stroke which the bank manager fell for.

The second stop was the National Union of Seafarers of India ( NUSI) on the Benaulim side of the Khareband bridge , here too the official Xavier Rodrigues  asked my mother to furnish along with other documents a  Xerox copy of the ration card for availing of the monthly seamen dole for ex-seamen’s wife’s.

Yes, the ration card continues to be a proof residence and a document which many a government offices and semi-governments offices, banks continue to rely upon, when the electoral card was to serve and replace the same multipurpose. But that has not happened.

Indian administration thrives by creating doubts in the  minds of the people which leads to chaos and insisting on the ration card as proof when it should have discarded long ago is a classic example. With no photographs on the ration cards to proof your identity, impersonation by furnishing  someone else card is a method used by many illiterate people and a ploy employed by politicians to increase the vote banks in Goa.

For the migrant non-Goans who have settled in Goa and who have been pouring into Goa, getting a ration card is easy, backed as they are by politicians.

Lorna’s and that of GOACAN stand on ration cards cannot be brushed aside - if you do not collect any grains from the ration shop or kerosene from the authorized dealer, then there is no need to have a ration card.

But the lower income group (LIG) people continue to pick up the grains while the middle income group living in villages occasionally collect the subsidized kerosene to burn a killed snake or to drive the ants away.

In the past the Goans lined up to collect extra quotas of sugar, rice, ghee and oil from the fair price shop in Goa, preparing sweets for special occasions like Diwali, Christmas and Ganesh festivals, all that is pushed into the past. But one thing has not changes is bribery and harassment which helpless and infirm people are subjected to in Goa by bribe hungry government officials.

For a niz Goenkar like me, getting my lost/displaced ration card like moving a mountain, one of the many harsh lessons which I learnt on my holiday in Goa. But there was hope at the end of the tunnel as young people like footballer-turned government official Rupak Naik, are some people who still have sincerity and integrity, a quality which is becoming rarer and rarer to find in Goa. The end message for me was – Goa is changing, but not for good, but for worse.