Now link your Aadhaar with your dog

The jury may still be out on whether India is an elected dictatorship, but it should be unanimous on the fact that it is a bureaucratic 'diktat-orship'. For the last few years, our ministries and their pen-pushers, denuded of any role in any sane policy formulation, have been passing their time in issuing all kinds of diktats on a daily basis, like bullets coming out of a Kalashnikov, with equally damaging effects on us citizens.

So we have to contend with new rules every second day, on KYC, motor vehicles, FastTags, PUCs, PAN, Aadhaar/ bank/ phone/ EPIC/ electricity meter linkages, demat accounts, tax revisions, fuel emission standards, nominations and anything else that catches their fancy. These rules  are made without any consultation with stakeholders and usually lack any sense or logic. A few will suffice to prove my point.

Take the latest diktat in the NCR (National Capital Region): all vehicles should affix a petrol/ diesel/ EV sticker on their windshields so the cops can identify them BVR (Beyond Visual Range) in the manner of fighter jets. Non-compliant vehicles will be denied PUCs and fuel and will be fined too, for good measure. To add to our misery and confusion, no one has a clue where these stickers are available! Not even Grok can figure out why this is necessary.

If the cops need to see everything at a glance, then soon we may be asked to stick everything to the windshield — driving licence, registration, insurance, PUC, Aadhaar and the wife's photograph. In which case, accident fatalities will double to 300,000 per annum, since the driver won't be able to see anything through the windshield!

NOIDA introduced a mandatory pet registration policy a couple of years ago via an app. One has to feed in particulars (and a photo) of the pet, address, owner's name, vaccination proof. So far so good. But then, it also demands the owner's photo and Aadhaar details. Why, for God's sake? It is the dog which is being registered, not the owner, surely.

And what happens if the the owner's photo doesn't match that on Aadhaar, or resembles that of the dog? I have a friend who looks uncannily like his pet, a pedigreed bulldog, and there's every chance of the two photos getting mixed up, in which case the app will probably insist that my friend take the anti-rabies and distemper shots too, as a matter of abundant caution! Why not keep the whole thing simple?

It would appear that NOIDA is exceptionally endowed with cerebral bureaucrats: sometime back, another diktat was issued that required all buildings on arterial roads to illuminate 30 per cent of their exterior facades at night, to present a beautiful night-scape.

Another ill thought-out intervention, and completely unnecessary at a time when power consumption is going up by almost 10 per cent per annum. It will add to the electricity bills of residents, but even more important, it pushes up power consumption precisely at the time of day when the power load is at its highest! And it's all thermal power, because renewables are not available at night.

Such a policy is in total contradiction to the national power policy, which is trying to reduce dependence on coal-based power, currently at 70 per cent of the total power generated; it also bucks the global trend of reducing city lighting so as to lessen the heat island effect, cause less disturbance to nocturnal creatures, especially birds, and lower the stress that excessive lighting causes to humans.

Did the authorities even consider these factors, one wonders? Have they not heard of light pollution and the global trend to reduce it?

There is now a wave among city administrations to ban the humble tandoor, allegedly because they add to air pollution. Cities in MP, Maharashtra and UP have already issued orders to this effect. Tandoors are used primarily by bakeries and restaurants serving Mughlai food, and there would probably be a few hundred of them in every large city — compared to millions of vehicles!

I have not come across any report of any study carried out by any of these cities to establish that tandoors are a major source of pollution, compared to the major polluters — vehicles, construction, road dust, burning of garbage and waste. Nothing meaningful is ever done to tackle the major polluters, but the tandoors are easy target, as all low-hanging fruits are.

The ban endangers one of our traditional, popular and distinctive cuisines, one copied across the world: could that be the real motive behind these bans, I sometimes wonder. And will they also ban cooking at home since PNG/CNG also releases significant quantities of nitrogen dioxide, according to studies by the Universities of Oxford and York?

It is estimated that 40,000 people die every year in the UK because of this. And cows too for good measure as their flatulence releases vast amounts of methane?

I guess the picture above says it all: neurons and protons don't stand a chance against morons.

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and author of Holy Cows and Loose Cannons — the Duffer Zone Chronicles and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com

More of his writing may be read here.