Warts And All, The System Works

I must be an "early adopter" in Running From Pillar To Post To Link Aadhaar Card To Bank Account: A year later, the early and late majority of LPG subsidy beneficiaries have still not managed to link their Aadhaar Cards to their bank accounts.

But it doesn't matter any more.

Politicians sensed that it was a dumb idea to tell people to pay the full price for LPG cylinders first and ask them to wait for a year to collect the subsidy directly transferred to their Aadhaar-linked bank accounts. Therefore, the government recently scrapped this so-called "Direct Benefit Transfer" scheme. With the benefit of hindsight, I always found this scheme to be harebrained. Much as the media and intellegentsia have lamented the demise of the Aadhaar Card's only - er, strongest - use case, I'm glad that better sense has prevailed finally.

Coming back to my case, even if the bank didn't link my Aadhaar Card to my bank account within the promised seven working days, it did complete the job after a few months. Which was well before the government transferred the LPG subsidy to my bank account. Oops, scrapped the scheme for doing so.

Meanwhile, by taking five months to fix a small typo on its website, my bank gave me one more opportunity to popularize my BFSI version of Bill Gates’ famous saying, “We always overestimate what banks can do in seven working days but underestimate what they can accomplish in one year”.

As a result of these experiences, I'm convinced that "The System" works. Eventually. Even if it does only after a few false starts and many months later. Someone told me that they'd seen this graffiti on a London Tube decades ago: "If system was the answer, your question wasn't profound". How true this line rings even today!