What’s in a name, you might ask, blithely living in the privilege of your monosyllabic first and last names. My full name is Tirumalai Cunnavakam Anandanpillai Sharad Raghavan and I’ve faced no end of trouble with the government over it.
This isn’t a rant to just vent my feelings, either. It’s a major issue faced by lakhs of people — predominantly from South India — when they try to navigate the myriad government IDs and their differing rules. Hanging in the balance are important things like bank KYC and long-term investments in mutual funds.
From my name not fitting in my passport, to the authorities mangling it in print, to not being able to complete my KYC as a result, to now actively considering duping the government in what has to be one of the most ridiculous ways, my nomenclature travails with the government have been extensive.
Dots, initials & IT department
Let’s start at the beginning. My first passport had my correct name since it was handwritten. They somehow managed to squeeze all 46 characters of my name onto the page, a feat only surpassed by fitting my father’s name, which is 49 characters long. But trouble began when my passport came up for renewal in 2004.
Things had progressed and the passports were now digitally printed. The problem was that the software had a character limit on the length of the name. That limit was shorter than 46 letters, and this clearly broke the minds of the people processing my application. What they finally printed on my passport in 2004 was a mangled mess — Sharad Tirumalai Cunnavakam Raghavan. The words were in the wrong order, and one of the words — Anandanpillai — had simply been dropped.
Back then, I had no foreign travel coming up and was preparing for my board exams so I didn’t immediately try to do anything about rectifying this error. In any case, I thought it would be easy to fix and wouldn’t have larger ramifications. My mistake.
At the time, my parents decided to get me a PAN card. Now, the PAN naturally took the name that was on my passport. So, now I had not one but two official IDs that had my name wrong. This, of course, could not continue.
I went to the passport office and — after a full day of shuttling between counters and writing self-declarations and getting them notarised — I managed to get my passport name changed to TCA Sharad Raghavan. Phew. Should be easy to get my PAN name changed too, right? Wrong.
For some inexplicable reason, the Income Tax Department does not allow abbreviations in the PAN. Simultaneously, thanks to the government’s insistence, I had by now linked my PAN to my Aadhaar. The Aadhaar, having used my new and fixed passport as the verifying document, had for some reason added dots between my initials — T.C.A. Sharad Raghavan. This is what broke the Income Tax Department.
Each time I applied for a new PAN card with the correct name, I would receive a reply saying this could not be done because the name on my Aadhaar contained initials. What this has meant is that I can’t do the KYC for mutual funds investments — since my PAN and Aadhaar don’t match — and so cannot start saving and investing for my old age. Condemned to the paltry interest rate of fixed deposits!
The solution to this — which I am seriously considering — will baffle you.
Also read: What’s worse than losing your phone? Finding it
Working ‘Digital India’ system
A chartered accountant friend told me the PAN authorities are fine with initials if you convince them that they are not, in fact, initials. So, he told me, I should get my Aadhaar name changed to the same as the passport — TCA Sharad Raghavan, without the dots — and tell the PAN authorities that my first name is Taca Sharad, but spelled as TCA Sharad. I am not joking. He said this was the only way.
In fact, this solution has worked with several other South Indians. He showed me copies of their PAN cards as proof. They had the abbreviations, just no dots.
Surely this deceit can’t be the only way to get around the system?
Meanwhile, my passport came up for renewal again this year (the renewal in 2014 having passed without an incident). This time, the authorities decided to add a whole different range of complications. On the instructions of the police officer, I had to round up not one but two neighbours, who had to come with their address proofs in original and photocopy, to verify that I lived at my current address.
Consider how tough it is for three different working professionals to coordinate with a police officer — who has more important things to do — to all be at the same place at the same time, with the required documents and forms.
The officer then had to take a selfie with all of us, just to be sure. Again, no jokes.
In any case, the police verification took place without a hitch and with only some amount of back-and-forth. As soon as I receive my fresh passport, I will be faced with the poor choice of either trying to fool the Income Tax Department or giving up on my long-term financial plans.
All of this would have been unnecessary if the PAN system was more accommodating. It’s astonishing that, 10 years into ‘Digital India’, something as simple as abbreviations still remain impossible for the system to handle.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)