Bill Paying in time

I used a facility for paying bills online though a bank account for paying a credit card bill. Earlier I was using NEFT for this purpose, and I thought that facility called Bill Pay would be an improvement. Two days later, the credit card company sent me a reminder to pay. I was irritated to be reminded after paying well in time and called the customer service to complain. The person who took the call said the payment had taken four days to reach them, and on the day the reminder was sent the amount had not reached them. In the modern day and age, justifying a four-day delay in passing the customer’s money on seems wrong to me. Computers do the work and unless the bank consciously slow down the process, they would not take four days. What is the moral?

1. Don’t assume that mechanisms banks provide for online payment are fast. Your account is debited immediately! But when your bill gets paid is another matter. Get them to tell you in writing how fast they will pay your bill.
2. Prefer to pay using NEFT. There is an intermediary here who does not allow banks to profit from delaying your payments. 

I   Later, I received a "politely" worded message from another card-issuer saying "You can now use NEFT to pay our card bill and get same day credit of funds". This was part of their acknowledgement message saying that my payment was credited on such and such date. Why not be fairer to millions of customers and say "Watch out! NEFT may be the fastest way of paying our bill. It usually gives same day credit of your funds". 

Srinivasan Ramani

Digitization of electoral rolls

India has made amazing progress in computerization. Look at what digital wallets have achieved in the last three years. Railway computerization, Banking Computerization, e-Commerce portals are examples of world class computerization. You cannot, however, put election related computerization in that list. Is it because the job is neither the central government’s nor that of the state governments? Is it because a lot of the work is done by staff whose daytime jobs have nothing to do with handling election data? Is it because you can fob off thousands of complaints with excuses more easily than you can do in railways or in banks? Whatever be the answer, the challenge of reliable computerization of election data is a task ahead of us rather than behind us.

There is no denying the magnitude of the task, particularly when data is recorded in multiple scripts, and there is probably no central computerization. A tradition of quality audit seems to be unheard of in the software implementation. The user interfaces leave a lot to be desired. Data is not accessible for verification and updating/corrections on a continuous basis. Once the borrowed staff go away, there is no way to maintain the data till the next election arrives.

My wife whose name was not on the rolls, though she has a valid Voter ID Card. She has been told to wait till May 25 and fill up a form, and submit it with photographs and a copy of her Aadhaar card. Hasn’t the judiciary put limits on purposes for which you can demand an Aadhaar ID?   

Visit the following article that talks of 1.35 million voters being deleted from the rolls in one city and 6.5 million voters being deleted in a state! Did they inform the people concerned?

https://www.moneylife.in/article/missing-voter-names-illegal-deletions-modifications-of-voter-list-galore/37147.html

What is the total number of voters that have been denied their votes in this election? I am sure they would say “We do not keep track of the complaints made at the voting booths, Sir!”

The number could be in excess of ten million, if you go by examples given in the quoted article.

Let me make a suggestion. Every bank keeps mobile numbers of its customers. If the customer registers for it, every deposit and withdrawal from their account is reported to them within minutes. Could not the system inform 1.35 million voters in a city who are being deleted from the rolls through SMS? Tell them what is missing, and how to get this rectified.   

When the number of voters who get their names deleted is large, people will easily believe that there are mala fide deletions in plenty. 

Srinivasan Ramani