A customer is forced to visit the department four times instead of one, in order to pay the motor vehicle tax.
KARACHI: Even a well-meaning government can unwittingly become its own enemy when it becomes excessively insensitive and inefficient. Here is a real life example of a citizen wanting to pay the motor vehicle tax. He takes a day off, goes to the designated bank, finds the tax-receiving person missing, waits for an hour and comes back having wasted half a day.
The next day he tries his luck again. This time, he is told that the system is down and is given an option to wait or come back some other day. Essentially, to save the third visit, he decides to wait. The mission, however, is aborted after an hour or two as the computer system shows no signs of returning to normalcy.
The third visit appears to get on well till the person behind the counter declares that the tax tokens are available only till June 2014. What this benign-looking sentence really means is: ‘Go away for now and come back in a few months to collect the tax token for the remaining six months of 2014.’
In simple words, a customer is forced to visit the department four times instead of one, in order to pay the motor vehicle tax. It does not require serious arithmetic to conclude that this inefficiency makes the 2.5 million vehicle owners of Karachi to make 10 million visits to the designated Excise and Taxation payment locations.
Now let us look at the bigger picture. Considering that each visit consumes about half a working day, the government succeeds in destroying five million workdays of its citizens. Needless to say that people receive similar treatment while paying yet other bills and taxes to the reluctant government departments. What is the environmental cost of this madness? Millions of gallons of fuel used and millions of extra trips causing smoke and congestion on the roads. Can the government show some concern for the carbon footprint, if not the convenience of its citizens, by reducing these visits from four to one?
Naeem Sadiq
Published in The Express Tribune, November 27th, 2013.
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