I went to an e-seva counter at Begumpet today, to pay a fine levied by the Hyderabad traffic cops. The story unfolds as follows

According to the inland letter received from the commissioner's office, I jumped a traffic signal on January 03, 2008. I received a snail mail after a gap of nearly five months (on June 20th) asking me to pay Rs.135 as fine. I even don't know whether I committed the mentioned offense. First, I thought of writing to the commissioner asking him the reason for delay in sending the challan. But again, I was sure that I would never get a reply.

Hence, like a responsible citizen, I tried to pay it on the same day. Upon my friend Akhil's advice, we tried to pay it online. He already had registered with the website to pay fine for a similar offense. The server didn't accept his request. Thought the server was down and tried the day after. But the result was same. This went on for about one week. Finally, I and another traffic violator (my friend Ramakrishna) decided to end this agony by paying at the counter. Poor Akhil tried to pay online even minutes before our journey to the e-seva counter, but to no avail.

Finally, we were at the counter and were served with tokens and asked to sit in the waiting hall. There were about a handful of gentlemen (bill payers) inside and I thought it would all be over in a jiffy. But the server proved me wrong and made us wait for about 15 minutes. I learned from the team there that the server was down since June 21, 2007, and that there was no one to take care.

I believe that the e-seva concept is given a step motherly treatment by the current government, as it was started by TDP. Another interesting observation was that Rajiv's name was prefixed before the e-seva logo.

Enough of Rajiv bhajan, I sincerely wish Congress party's debacle in the coming elections, at least in Andhra Pradesh.