One of the biggest issues we face in our cities as to today is the problem with regard to our sorry state of municipal services. The level of services varies from city to city, but some of the biggest problems that people currently face are examples of sorry state of sewage and cleanliness, poor condition of roads and streets, inadequate sanitation and garbage collection, poor upkeep of our current infra-structure. These problems can be attributed to bad governance, bad leadership, corruption and sheer laziness. Many times, citizens suffer because of this, and because of lack of responsibility, are unable to do much about this poor condition of municipal services. However, the courts are always a way to get justice, even if it takes a decade to do this:

CHENNAI: The Madras high court has directed the Chennai Corporation to pay compensation of Rs 1 lakh to the parents of a child, who drowned in a storm water drain negligently left open by sanitation workers. Pointing out that the 18-month-old Venugopal died over 10 years ago, Justice Chandru decried the Chennai Corporation for having failed to submit its reply to the court in a timely manner.
He directed the civic body to pay the compensation amount to the child’s parents within four weeks, and warned that any failure in this regard would be viewed seriously by the court. “Insofar as the death of Venugopal, the Chennai Corporation is squarely responsible. Because of their negligence in not keeping the storm water drainage in closed condition, such an incident had happened. The minor Venugopal cannot be expected to know the danger of the stormwater drainage kept in an open condition,” he said.

In this case, the drain was kept open while cleaning was happening. This is negligence, since as the court pointed out, it is not expected that children will have the same sense of danger. Keeping a drain open like this was hence very dangerous.

They sound like the answer to all your nightmares while driving. Normally, your car works fine, but consider the case when suddenly your car stops in the middle of the journey, leaving you totally helpless. This could be because of a puncture, could be because some other vehicle hit your car, or could be some other problem that is not yet diagnosed (at least, you don’t have the capabilities of a motor mechanic that you can quickly diagnose the problem). Now, you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, and you may not be able to figure out what is wrong with a car; you may not be even in a position that you can change the wheel of the car yourself. In such cases, there are now a number of car distress helplines that promise to help you quickly. Some of these (atleast in the Delhi / NCR region) are FastTrack, Race, Cross-Roads; and before you think that this is an advertising blog for them, this post is to point out a few problems in their functioning.
I have tried out a few of them, and performance has dipped badly in the last few years. Their promise is that they will be there within 30 minutes of filing a complaint; now the most common scenario is that of female family members and friends; if they get a puncture, it is not feasible for some of them to do the actual changing of the tyre. Further, you don’t know where it can happen, and if you have a service where you can get a tire replaced within 30 minutes, that is great.
Now, that was the promise. Unfortunately, the promise is not getting fulfilled. With 2 of these vendors (Race and CrossRoads), I have had a bad experience. In both case, there was a puncture, and a lady was waiting after calling them. They promised 30 minutes, but even 1 hour later, no trace. You call them again, and they were getting rude (Ma’am, they are coming, you need to wait). Finally, after 1.5 hours, we managed to make some local arrangements (the good part was that this happened at a place where it was crowded, so there was no safety issue). However, this is bad customer service - promising something that involved safety and convenience, and then not delivering. I will be very hesitant the next time they ask me for money for this service.
I wonder what the experience of other people with such kind of services has been like ?

One always thinks of the Government as being slow, not able to catch onto the latest technology trends, and using old procedures. However, this is not always true, and the Government has been able to surprise us many times by showing its ability to adopt some of the newer technologies, and at the same time, do so with the required safe-guards. So, first we had the railways ticket booking website, http://irctc.co.in, and then we have the Tax Authority of the country trying to use all modern trends for tax filing. So, if you refer to the website (link) for Income Tax India, you will be able to download forms, and read more about details related to your tax filing. The website even has a very basic Tax calculator (link)
The entire procedure for paying tax online is initiated at this link (link), with a more detailed explanation about how to find list of banks, making payment and challan details, getting receipt / confirmation, etc available at these 2 documents (link 1, link 2). If you prefer to pay online with some more help, then there are various 3rd parties that can help you with the payment process (you can fill in a simple filing, or opt for a higher package if you have more sources of income besides a simple Form 16, and some of them even give an option of walking into their office and filing in the details). Here are the links to these sites:
1. http://www.taxspanner.com/ (Including the option of getting a digital signature). Read more at the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
2. http://www.taxsmile.com/. Read more about it on the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
3. http://www.taxshax.com/. Read more at the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Citizens of the country have mostly bad thoughts about interacting with Government bodies; a lot of them come across officialdom who are not responsive and caring about their needs (as an example, making them come repeatedly even for small errors in the red tape process), and so on. There are babus (officials), who are friendly, but most are like hard faced officials, unwilling to come across as caring people. It would be nice for people to live in a gated community (and self-sufficient place) where one would not have to interact with the Government bureaucracy, but that is living in an ideal world. However, there are cases when official responses are such that you would be horrified to read about such cases, and wonder as to how the official structure of the country could be so insensitive to the problems faced by citizens, that too when the situation is due to a fault of the agency themselves. The Delhi Development Authority however has been roundly criticized from time to time over its openness, caring nature (lack of it), and inability to care about what citizens go through. Read this article for more information:

Wondering if DDA derives “some kind of sadistic pleasure” in harassing citizens, Delhi High Court has slammed the civic agency in a case of double allotment of a flat in 1991 due to which the rightful owner was deprived of its possession and had to wage a 17 year legal battle in court.
“Ignoring dictum of law the officials of DDA keep perpetuating their illegal acts giving an impression as if they derive some kind of sadistic pleasure to harass the citizens,” HC observed while castigating the civic body for having the nerve to demand double the price of a flat which wasn’t handed over to Gandhi in 1991 because of DDA’s double allotment mistake.

This case really highlights as to how uncaring an agency can be. DDA double-allotted a flat in 1991, and when the lady in question tried to get the mistake corrected, the DDA did a fresh allotment to her after 10 years and charged her new prices, at double the original cost. In such cases, the Court should also assign individual responsibility and fine officials responsible (including fining officials of the rank of Chairman and Vice-Chairman if they had made such recommendations).

Even before the privatization of power distribution in Delhi, there were plenty of complaints regarding shoddy customer behavior by the staff of the then Government electricity arm - DESU. It was expected that after the work was handed over to private companies, things would better. Some customers reported improved behavior, but there were still a large number of complaints that keep on coming in.
Consider the case of a customer who reports that the meter got burnt, but the private electricity company takes no action. Instead, much later, it accuses the customer of power theft, and hands over a whopping bill to the customer; and in the worst sort of behavior, threatens to use the powerful anti-theft bill to force the customer to make payment. It is only when the customer complained to the customer board that some positive action took place:

NEW DELHI: Pulling up BSES Yamuna for sending an unaccounted bill of Rs 1.5 lakh to a consumer, the state consumer commission has slapped a fine of Rs 50,000 on the discom and also directed it to refund the bill amount to the complainant.
Justice Kapoor said: “On receiving the complaint, the discom should restore electricity immediately and ensure that necessary action is taken at the site. The burnt meter should be removed and tested to see the cause of the fire. A new meter should be provided within three days. Thereafter, a bill based on the estimated energy consumption pattern of 6 months prior to and 6 months after the period during which meter remained defective has to be raised.”

The basic problem remains that most of these companies are not geared to handle customer problems, and tend to be behave in a way that is not suited to handle the needs of customers. This was a customer who complained, but there will be thousands others who do not know how to complain and get pushed by the strong action of these companies.