13.8 — Everyday Civics

A passport and a visa are frequently confused and they do opposite things.

A passport is issued by your own government and it is a request. The standard wording inside an Indian passport asks all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely and to afford assistance and protection. It identifies you and asserts that your country will take you back.

A visa is issued by a foreign government and it is a permission — and, importantly, a permission to travel to a port of entry and request admission, not a guarantee of admission. The border officer decides.

So a passport is your country vouching for you and a visa is another country's conditional consent. Neither is a right to enter anywhere.

And the reason this matters is that a person with neither is not merely inconvenienced. A stateless person, or one whose documents are not recognised, cannot legally work, travel, own property, open an account or claim any entitlement — which is Chapter 13.1's point about the state being a system of records, experienced from the outside.

This chapter covers the machinery of citizenship that people encounter only when something goes wrong.

The passport system

It is recent. Before the First World War, travel across most of Europe required no passport. The modern system was introduced as a wartime security measure and, like most such measures, was not removed. The standardised booklet format dates from a League of Nations conference in 1920.

The Indian passport is issued under the Passports Act 1967, and the Supreme Court held in Maneka Gandhi in 1978 that the right to travel abroad is part of personal liberty under Article 21 and that a passport cannot be impounded without a fair procedure. That judgement is also where the Court established that any procedure depriving a person of liberty must be fair, just and reasonable — one of the most consequential rulings in Indian constitutional law, arising from a passport case.

Passport strength — the number of countries accessible without a prior visa — varies enormously and correlates with a country's income and its record on emigration and overstay. This is a real and rarely acknowledged inequality: the same journey requires weeks of documentation for one person and a boarding pass for another.

Taxes

Where the money actually comes from and goes, for India, because most people have no picture of it.

The main revenue sources. Goods and Services Tax, an indirect tax on consumption, shared between the centre and states. Income tax, paid by a small proportion of the population — India's direct tax base is narrow. Corporate tax. Customs duties. And excise on petroleum products, which is a very large contributor.

Direct versus indirect matters for fairness. An income tax can be progressive — higher rates on higher incomes. A consumption tax is regressive in effect, because a poor household spends nearly all its income and a rich one saves part of it, so the tax takes a larger share of the poor household's income. GST's multiple rate slabs, with essentials at zero or low rates, are an attempt to offset this.

Where it goes. The largest items in the Indian union budget are interest payments on past borrowing, defence, subsidies — food, fertiliser and fuel — transfers to states, and capital expenditure on infrastructure.

Interest on debt is among the single largest items, which is the compounding cost of past deficits and is the practical reason fiscal discipline matters.

And the compliance point from Chapter 13.1. Tax morale correlates with perceived fairness and perceived service quality far more than with the penalty for evasion. A country where the visible rich evade and the services are poor has a compliance problem that enforcement alone cannot fix.

Registration, licences and what they establish

Three different things that are frequently confused.

Registration records that something exists — a birth, a marriage, a company, a property transfer. It creates evidence, not permission.

A licence is permission to do something otherwise prohibited — drive, practise medicine, sell alcohol, broadcast.

And certification attests to a quality or a standard — a degree, a professional qualification, a product mark.

Why registration matters more than it looks. An unregistered birth means no school admission, no passport, no voter roll entry and no inheritance claim. An unregistered marriage leaves a spouse without maintenance or property rights. An unregistered property transaction is unenforceable.

Indian land records are the standing problem (Chapter 9.14). Most Indian land titles are presumptive rather than conclusive — the record shows who paid the revenue, not who owns the land — which means ownership can be challenged, which means land cannot be reliably used as collateral, which is a substantial constraint on rural credit. The digitisation and conclusive-titling programmes address it slowly.

If you are stopped by the police

The operative rules in India, stated as facts rather than advice.

You must be informed of the grounds of arrest — Article 22(1).

You must be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours, excluding travel time — Article 22(2).

You have the right to consult a lawyer of your choice.

A confession made to a police officer is not admissible against you — Evidence Act sections 25 and 26 (Chapter 13.4).

You cannot be compelled to be a witness against yourself — Article 20(3).

Women cannot be arrested after sunset and before sunrise except in exceptional circumstances with a magistrate's prior permission, and must be arrested by a woman officer.

And the D. K. Basu guidelines, issued by the Supreme Court in 1997 and later incorporated into statute, require that arresting officers wear visible identification, that an arrest memo be prepared and attested by a witness, that a relative or friend be informed, and that the arrested person be medically examined periodically.

These exist because custodial deaths and torture were documented, which is why the guidelines are that specific.

Consumer and grievance mechanisms

India has an unusually developed set of statutory grievance routes and most people do not use them.

Consumer courts under the Consumer Protection Act, with district, state and national levels, no requirement for a lawyer, low fees and comparatively fast disposal for straightforward claims about defective goods and deficient services.

The Right to Information Act, 2005, which is a genuinely powerful instrument. Any citizen may request information from a public authority, which must respond within 30 days, with a fee of ten rupees. It has been used to expose ration diversion, road contract failures, appointment irregularities and enormous quantities of local corruption. Its weaknesses are delays, exemptions, and — seriously — that a substantial number of RTI activists have been attacked or killed.

Ombudsmen and regulators for banking, insurance, telecoms and electricity, each with a defined complaint procedure.

And Lok Adalat — people's courts — which settle compoundable matters by agreement, with the settlement having the force of a decree and no appeal.

Voting and the roll

You must be on the electoral roll to vote, and being a citizen is not sufficient. Registration is a separate act and rolls are revised periodically.

The specific practical points. You register with the constituency where you ordinarily reside, which is a problem for internal migrants — a very large group in India, who frequently remain registered where they came from and cannot practically travel to vote. Remote voting for domestic migrants has been proposed and not implemented.

NOTA — none of the above — has been on Indian ballots since 2013. It records disapproval and has no legal effect on the result: the candidate with the most votes still wins even if NOTA exceeds their total.

The things worth doing before you need them

A short list, because this chapter is meant to be usable.

Keep your identity documents consistent. Name spellings, dates of birth and parents' names that differ across documents produce enormous difficulty later, and correcting them afterwards is slow.

Register the things that need registering — marriage, property, and a will. Dying without a will in India means the applicable personal law determines succession, which is frequently not what the deceased intended and is always slower.

Nominate. Bank accounts, insurance policies and provident fund accounts all permit a nominee, and the absence of one converts a simple transfer into a legal proceeding.

Keep records of tax filings and property transactions for the statutory periods.

And know which authority handles what. Most people's experience of the state going wrong is not oppression; it is not knowing which office to go to and being sent between three of them.

Where this shows up in your life

All of it, at the specific moments when it matters most and when there is least time to learn it — an arrest, a death, a dispute, a border.

And the general point that closes this Part. Chapter 13.1 argued that a state is a shared fiction held up by records and by belief. This chapter is the practical face of that: your rights are real to the extent that you can document them, claim them from the right office, and wait as long as the process takes.

Which means that knowing the machinery is not a substitute for rights and it is a large part of whether you get them.

What Part 13 established

A state is a shared belief backed by records and a monopoly of legitimate force, and its strength is its capacity to tax, enforce, administer and defend — which is independent of whether it is authoritarian. The forms of government trade speed against correction, and the evidence does not support the claim that authoritarian systems develop faster, though it does show they have far higher variance. A constitution creates, allocates, limits and entrenches, and India's is long because it was building a state from nothing in a country of extraordinary diversity. Law works by standards of proof, rules of evidence and enforcement capacity, and rights are real only where a poor person can obtain them from a court in time. Elections are decided as much by the counting system as by the voters. And international law works well where reciprocity applies and not at all against a great power's core interests, which is both a serious indictment and better than nothing.

What the next Part covers

Part 14 is the physical constraint. The carbon cycle and how the climate system actually works, how we know it is changing and how confident that knowledge is, what the warming actually does to weather, water, food and coasts, every energy source assessed honestly including the ones people dislike, what a transition actually requires, and the other environmental limits — water, soil, biodiversity and waste — that are less discussed and in some cases more immediate.