Recently I read an article in the news paper about improving the speed of passport delivery to citizens. This is the news published in Times of India. It seems that passports are getting delayed as the police verification is taking a lot of time. In order to improve the speed, the passport office is planning to incentivize the police. That is, if the police completes their verification within 21 days, then would get more money else they are penalized by reducing the incentive. I felt that this is one of the most dumbest idea ever implemented !!
Here is the quote from the news paper:
However, he said the delivery of passports has been expedited by incentivizing police. "We have reduced the time taken for delivery once the application is sent for processing. We are insisting that the police department send in police verification reports in 21 days. For each report sent before 21 days, cops are incentivized Rs 150 per report. If sent later, they get Rs 25 only. This will reduce the time taken to get the passport delivered. In some cases, the passport is delivered less than a week if verification report is sent fast,"
There are couple of issues with the above idea:
1. I don’t think any root cause analysis has been done to identify the delay in verification. There could be various reasons for the delay.
For example, this passport verification may not be the top of police’s backlog list. It is also possible that police force don’t have sufficient people to support this activity.
A root cause analysis could have helped to unearth the real cause of the delay and proper action could have been taken.
2. Going forward, I could see that the all police verification will complete within 21 days due to incentives. Question is, at the cost of WHAT ? I could see that the quality of verification will drop heavily as the possible root causes are never addressed.
Being in the software industry, we keep hearing that external motivation causes more harm than the anything else. The above story correlates to what we commonly see in the organizations. Employees are incentivized for ensuring on time delivery. But the companies pays for the cost of quality at a later stage, which no one really bothers or accounts for.
1 comment:
You've hit the nail on the head. I still remember Dan Pink's Drive in which he shows cold & hard facts on why the Carrot & Stick approach is flawed, and, evne then, there is a huge reliance on such a approach within Organizations.
It may happen that police start demanding more money (read, bribe) from Citizens who want to get the verification done as soon as possible.
And, what if they overlook a few details to make the rpeorts go out faster, endangering the security within the country.
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