My friend Amitabha Saha Roy writes:

We had a pleasant expereince at the sub-registrar office when we went to register a trust that we are forming for restoring Arekere lake.

Spending a Saturday in the Govt sub-registrar office is not exactly how anyone would look forward to spending a weekend. When we think of a government office, the most common things that come to our mind are corruption, inefficiency and bureaucracy. But, our experience at the Begur Sub-registrar office proved to be exactly the opposite and made it a weekend to remember.

We are a team of volunteers working on an initiative to restore the Aerkere Lake on Banerghatta Road. We are forming a trust and had to get the trust registered at the Begur sub-registrar office. We obviously entered the office with a lot of apprehensions. But, to our pleasant surprise, we could easily walk in to the sub-registrar’s office and she was extremely approachable. She reviewed our documents, made helpful suggestions to make the required corrections and put us on to the right people to get the document processed. From the top to bottom, right from the helpers, clerks to the sub-registrar, everyone was quite helpful. The employee in charge of digitizing the trust documents would put a juggler to shame. It was a sight to see him juggling with so many tasks like taking pictures, scanning the document, processing the document for so many people and doing it with a smile. The whole place was buzzing with activity. It was well past lunch time, but the employees were extremely busy clearing off as many documents as possible. We did not have to pay a single paisa as bribe. At the end, we were extremely pleased with the positive experience of dealing with the sub-registrar office and getting our mission accomplished.

It would be too optimistic to expect the same pleasant experience in every government office. But, I think we paint all government offices with the same broad brush stereotyping them as corrupt and inefficient which is quite unfair.

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