Yesterday I wrote about how good intent at the top doesn’t guarantee good experience at the bottom. Today I want to stay with that thought — but zoom into one specific detail that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
When my turn came at the Aadhaar update facility, I was asked to press my fingers onto a fingerprint machine. Every fingertip, every inch of my palm.
The machine looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time.
My first thought was hygiene. We had just lived through a pandemic. But then I stopped and thought about it differently. Nobody bought that machine and decided it would go uncleaned. Nobody made that choice. It just happened — because somebody procured the equipment and nobody was given ownership of maintaining it.
Two completely separate decisions. Made by two completely separate people. With a gap in between that nobody noticed.
That gap is where the cleaning lives. Or doesn’t.
This is true of most things that slowly stop working. It isn’t sabotage. It isn’t negligence in the dramatic sense. It’s just that procurement and maintenance are treated as two different problems — and the second one never gets its own owner.
The machine works. It’s just nobody’s job to clean it.
