Our Life in Delhi, Communication Breakdown, on John ki Jaan

Communication Breakdown – July 14 to 20, 2007

You would think that in India, the land of engineers and IT specialists, you’d have no problem getting a cell phone and Internet connection. But this is India, where nothing happens unless you harangue someone a billion times.

Getting a SIM card for a cell phone was surprisingly easy—we just walked into a shop in the nearby Malviya Nagar market and bought two. (We already had two GMS cell phones, so we only needed SIM cards.) Of course, purchasing the SIM cards was easy only because we had Gitanjali’s sister Yamini buy them for us.

If we would’ve tried to get new cell phone service, we would’ve had to present proof of residence, various documents proving our identity, and some passport photos. However, Yamini could add two post-paid accounts to her existing account with minimal hassles. (She only had to fill out one form and provide two passport photos.)

So we bought two pre-pay SIM cards that convert to post-pay cards after 24 to 48 hours. At least that’s how the cards work in the ideal world.

After 24 hours, we checked with Airtel to see if the cards had converted to post-pay. (We were just being optimistic in thinking this would occur so quickly.)

The Airtel customer service rep informed us that pre-pay-to-post-pay cards didn’t exist so the store must have sold us forged cards. This seemed rather odd since the cards came in an Airtel package that specifically stated they were for pre-pay-to-post-pay conversion. We promptly ignored this woman, suspecting she didn’t know what products Airtel sold.

After 48 hours, we called Airtel customer service again to see if the cards had converted to post-pay. This time, we spoke with someone who didn’t deny the existence of the cards but said that someone else owned our phone numbers.

(The numbers we received begin with 98100, which surprises and enthralls many people because numbers starting with these digits were among the first mobile numbers distributed in India. Having a 98100 seems to be a rare, privileged thing.)

Clearly, our numbers had been recycled, and after much confusion and several hours of discussion (how could we have someone else’s phone numbers?), I arrived at the obvious answer—the paperwork simply hadn’t been processed.

The handwritten form we had filled out in the shop Sunday had to pass through many hands over the course of many days before the information could be input into a computer system and uploaded into the main database.

One other thing the customer person told us—the cards hadn’t converted to post-pay.

So the next day, we returned to the shop. The guy who helped us immediately called someone (without asking us for additional details), and within two minutes, he assured us the cards would be converted by the evening (72 hours after we bought them). Going by his quick resolution, we figured this was a pretty common problem.

The next day, being Thursday, four days after the purchase of the SIM cards, we called Airtel yet again to check on the card status. They had finally converted to post-pay, and they were even registered in Yamini’s name.

Ironically enough, someone from Airtel stopped at the house that afternoon to verify that Yamini truly lived at that address. Even though she wasn’t home, we showed the chap some ID card for her, and he left happy. Of course, checking after the cards had been officially activated seemed a little pointless.

Still, however mildly irritating the SIM card experience was, trying to get an Internet connection was been the most trying experience imaginable.