Madhya Pradesh Labor Department — an excellent example of how not to provide an online service

So, if you have an establishment, you have to go through establishment registration. Ideally the process should be peaceful, but alas, the people who designed the site are jerks.

I will describe to you the comedy of errors in the reverse chronological order. So, in the end when I got fed up, I thought may be, there is a way I can secure legit help. There was the option of ‘Help Center’, so went in there, filled the form, only to find this —

Ohh, okay.

What exactly do I select? — Select — ?

So, there is a help center but they would not be receiving any request in weeks/months. But then, who cares, less work for our government officers.

But this is just the end. If you click on ‘Track Status’ button on the site, you get information about random applications —

Why I am seeing this?

Congrats, Guru Ramdas Store, you did it! By the way, this is the first certificate generated application I am seeing, everyone else (about 5–6)is either objected or rejected. The Captcha actually failed to load.

Now, we enter our details and then, lo and behold —

That’s bad. Why is the application rejected?

After two months of deliberation, it says, in simple words, “Application Rejected”. Why, how, no information. How difficult it is to process the application of registration for a single room coaching class? At least inform us of the sins which we did. To figure this out, I tried to go to the help center and the grivance center.

Now, here on, you will have to trust me because I don’t have the screen shots.

Before this Application Rejected Status, we were at Application Objected. They wanted the rent agreement, scanned and uploaded. Only, they insist that the file size should be less than 300 kB. To give you a context, a standard scanner scans a single page to roughly 1–1.2 MB. A typical rent agreement of 4–5 pages would make it 5 MB roughly. So, after all sorts of wizardy with image-magick, we somehow get this file down to 235 kB. And the Application Objected message said, “Rent agreement not clear”. What the fuck do you want? How does one upload the application with higher quality if you insist on 300 kB?

Before that, we were struggling with another serious tech problem — the use of weird fonts.

What are those boxes over there?

I don’t know how long we struggled with that. We tried all sorts of variations - Windows, Linux, Google - but we solemnly swear, we were up to no good. On Windows, the application is full of square boxes. And they want us to tick this stuff, sign it, scan it and upload it. I can’t imagine how this won’t be rejected. (We did finally manage to clear it out, I don’t remember how.)

But, this is after completing the registration. There was one very important annoyance before the registration. You are filling in the form and then, they ask for challan. Okay, let me pay it.

Only to find out that there are when you go to pay the challan online, there are about 11 options to choose from, which have further sub-categories. Is coaching under labor or coaching under business? What should be the HOA? Shouldn’t the form be able to auto-fill this for me?

Bloody hell, I am a labor?

I have absolutely no clue what they mean. Note two heads of — Other Receipts and Other Receipts!

On random visits, you get some really awkward moments like —

Why?

And they say, ease of doing business on their home page. I spend my days on a computer — hell, I am a fucking IITian from the fucking Computer Science branch — and I cannot submit an application good enough for these bastards, how can an average person expect to fill these forms to their expectation?