It must have been an exhilarating and liberating experience for Devendra Fadnavis, Maharashtra chief minister, to ride a bike to work. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s clarion call to cut down fuel consumption in all forms has struck many a politician to devise new ways to commute. 

These demonstrations of sensitivity to the need of the hour are salutary and applaud-worthy, no doubt. The message would have driven home deeper if Fadnavis had done a slight detour to his office. Right at the closed front gate of the flag-fluttering portals of Mantralaya begins a humongous queue of aspiring visitors that turns right and right past barricades to another gate from where alone entry to its hallowed precincts is permitted to the aam janta.

On a peak summer afternoon, I had the humbling experience of watching a few hundred men stand in a long, snaking queue under a blazing sun breathing fire. They stood, quietly and patiently in the seemingly immobile queue, awaiting their turn to the pearly gates, beads of perspiration forming on their foreheads as soon as they wiped them.

Women were ushered ahead mercifully. Or so it seemed, until I was told near the gates to generate and get my Digipravesh QR code scanned. Digi who? Well, the Mantralaya babus in their infinite wisdom, had decided that entry into their portals would warrant the downloading of a specialized app which demands your aadhaar number and has multiple hostile layers of OTPs, proofs and pictures, every single one of which has to transact smoothly. Dare you stumble at any one step, you might have to be yanked back to the starting point. At some point in this virtual journey, after having been through the rigours a zillion times and feeling tasered, I had mastered the process so well I was swiping or tapping automatically on every screen in the desperate hope of an end point and a dreamy QR code that the man waiting behind the glass might swiftly scan like divine intervention.

“Why can’t I do this manually as before?” I asked. “What if I do not have a smart phone or if I do not wish to download the app on my phone?” Now, now, the man across the class barrier chided me, you are not permitted to not download the app. That choice is not yours. But in that rare event of you not owning a smart phone, there is a provision for manual screening. However, I was informed in a stern admonishment, that option – whatever that may be – was lost to me as I had been brandishing my phone at all angles ever since I arrived!

I sighed and went back to fiddling with the formidable app hoping it will yield at some point.  By the time you emerge from the experience, you are battle-weary enough to want to run right back. Is that the idea behind this veritable obstacle course? Some weird version of turf war?

The hundreds of men whose sweat had probably drilled a stream on the pavements were still inching ahead. Unsure whether they would make it to the finishing line before the end of day, I walked through a maze of turns  – that included a screening machine behind which a distracted constable was chatting as the bags rolled along – and lo and behold, the corridors of power awaited me. I was inside the Mantralaya complex and congratulations were in order.

There was a time not too long ago when one could enter the state administrative offices, meant for the public, by offering your credentials for verification and letting a camera take your picture. Someone somewhere decided that this was a “non-productive” way to do it and worked out an effective way to keep visitors at bay, or at the gate, for the longest time possible. From the whispers heard in these conspiratorial corridors, the app is keeping a few important people thriving.  

Maintaining just one entry point, even as the queues keep swelling up, and making a gate pass feel like an achievement smack of an inhuman disregard for the people who pay for these offices. 

Fadnavis would have zipped past the front gate with his helmet blocking the view on the sides. Had he chosen to tilt his head slightly to his left, he could have got cracking right there without needing to travel to his air-conditioned office on the sixth floor.

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