E-pass agency under pressure

E-pass agency under pressure

D.Govardan@timesgroup.com  20.06.2020

The 12-day lockdown imposed in Chennai, Thiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpet districts from Friday is giving the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency a tough time. Problems for the agency, which is working with one-third staff, have multiplied as companies and individuals have made multiple requests for passes.

“Each organization is supposed to make only one application. In that they can include names of even 5,000 people, if those many are permitted to work. Instead, several companies are submitting multiple applications, even hundreds in a few cases, and that has choked the whole system,” a senior official with the agency told TOI.

If one company has made 135 applications, in the case of another the company’s president and its security guard have applied separately. “Some of them have done this out of anxiety, while some others deliberately to get more employees to work,” the official said.

A company had submitted seven applications, giving the total number of employees differently in each application. This way it had planned to get more than 10% employees to work in the districts, where lockdown is imposed.

“Companies also submit registration number of vans but show them as cars. This way, they get to transport more people using that epass. Initially when lockdown was announced, we cleared all request for passes in two days and issued even 14,000 passes in one day. We trusted people and the job was easy. But with people now choking the system with multiple applications and concealing facts, verification is taking time. This has also put requests from genuine applicants in jeopardy,” the official pointed out.

An overburdened system and delay in issuing e-passes resulted in chaos in the companies too. “Lockdown was announced on Monday evening, but the system to apply fresh e-passes was made available on Thursday evening. As a result, some companies were forced to shut down operations on Friday. Further, the agency need not have cancelled all the old epasses and could have alerted about the one organization, one application policy - on the website itself,” an industry source said.