The FRRO Again... and Again... and Again...

If you read my latest post, I introduced you to the lunacy of the FRRO. This new process is significantly worse than the old way. For starters, they refuse to allow any appointments without the online form, and you can't get the form until you have uploaded the photos. My helpful team at work said they would try and see if they could talk themselves into the FRRO speaking Marathi and get an idea of what my options are. They were told to get an agent. The FRRO staff were very unhelpful. For every question, they repeatedly suggested getting an agent. One of my team members was finally able to upload the photos using a PC and Internet Explorer and finally got us appointments.

Now, agents run the gamut of cost and services. Most are completely useless. You still end up generating your own paperwork, you still have to show up at the FRRO. The only difference is that the agent is sharing a portion of his fee as a kickback to the FRRO personnel. Hence the speedier service. Typical charges are anywhere from 10,000 rupees to 40,000 rupees per person. Thomas Cook were the people charging the most and provided the least amount of support when we met with several of them. 

We decided to continue to go through this alone to save the company money. Silly me. After we provided all the paperwork and then some, they wanted more. They wanted a Form-16 (like a W2 in the States) even though I work for an American firm and get paid in the States in US dollars. I pay my taxes in India on this US income since my legal domicile is India for 365 days a year. There is a tax treaty between the US and India that keeps expats from paying double taxation in US and India. For this, I need to pay my taxes directly to the Indian government and for that I provided challans (receipts), along with a Form 26AS showing proof that my taxes have been paid to date. Because of their request for a Form-16, I had to get a second letter from my company explaining this. Of course, it needed to have a corporate stamp. Doh. 

The next visit required another police verification, beyond the one we had already done with the landlord verifying our new address, getting the new lease notarized, etc. This one required the police to physically come to the home and verify that we were actually living in the house. Of course, they came bearing sad stories about how underpaid they are and how they have families, to which I replied, yes, me, too. And I'm a single woman raising a child alone. And I'm putting him through college alone. They were looking for a bribe. Will walked them out of the house with a couple hundred rupees each. We went back to the police station the next day for a sealed envelope for the FRRO's second police verification.

By now, we had visited the FRRO four times. I thought we were done. Of course not. All the paperwork is scanned and they tell us we're all done, but there is nothing written into our passports, no paperwork saying we're in process, no acknowledgement that we are legally allowed to be here. At this point, we're illegal. Our visas have expired. The telephone companies, our satellite TV vendor, even our wifi service has been calling stating they're turning off our services because we have to supply updated visas by law. The woman behind the counter explained that everything has to go to Mumbai for processing. Oh, just fu*king kill me now.

I'm having flashbacks of Gurgaon, where it took nearly 8 months to finalize my visa, but here, they won't even grant an emergency one-month visa. If something happens to our family back home, we can't leave the country. We were planning on visiting Burma in the Spring, but that's now cancelled. We can't fly domestically nor travel by train until this is solved. My son was supposed to go on a class trip to Jaipur for the Jaipur Literary Festival today. He went to the train station only to say goodbye to his fellow students. It was a huge disappointment. Thanks, FRRO.

It is, by far, the worst experience the typical expat goes through in India. Think of your worst experience in an American Department of Motor Vehicles and add steroids (to them) and a hangover (to you). I think they actually enjoy screwing with expats. I seriously think that's what gets them up in the mornings and eager to go to work. Will is constantly telling me not to react because i get so upset dealing with these morons who can't make it clear, who deliberately obscure the process to make it so vague they can capriciously decide what paperwork is required for you when you approach the counter. It's never, ever, ever the same, and this is my sixth year doing this. It's enough to say, "Fu*k this country. I'm leaving". But then again, I can't leave until they give me a new visa. 

Dealing with the New Online FRRO Renewal Process

Blurg. You do know what the FRRO stands for right? Supposedly it stands for the Foreigner's Regional Registration Office, but we foreigners call it either the Foreigners' Rectal Reaming Office or simply just the Seventh Circle of Hell.

Every time you need to renew your visa and residency permits, it seems the rules have changed. This one seems like a pretty big change because now you can supposedly do the entire process online, schedule your appointment and show up at the appointed time and get your paperwork done.

Really. But in reality, absolutely not.

The web site to use is: http://www.indianfrro.gov.in/frro/menufrrodoc.jsp

In Pune, you need to file your renewal request at least 15 days prior to your visa expiration. In Kolkata and Gurgaon, it was 60 days prior (and it still took 8 months after expiration for the Gurgaon FRRO to finally issue my full year visa). In Delhi, I believe we had 30 days to renew... not sure, though.

The application is pretty self explanatory. Do make sure you temporarily save your form and write down your Temporary Application ID. You'll be going back and forth on this form until you get all the data filled in and some doesn't stick, for example, when I add my son into the form as a dependent, the data disappears. Also if you have had your visa renewed before, that data will disappear, too. Nice work QA people.

Paperwork For Employment Visas:

1. Original valid passport and visa.
2. Residential permit and extension form.
3. Passport size photo.
4. Copy of passport photo page showing validity dates.
5. Copy of India visa.
6. Terms and Conditions of Employment letter with salary, title, on company letterhead, signed and stamped with corporate seal.
7. Statement of Undertaking on company letterhead, signed and stamped with corporate seal.
8. Copy of passport or other valid ID of Indian national signing your company letters.
9. Bank Statements (I did last three months).
10. Copy of PAN card and income tax receipts (showing you are up to date with your Indian income tax payments for current year). If your company can provide a preliminary Form 16, that might work.
11. Another letter from your company explaining why you need to extend your visa for another year. Again, on company letterhead, signed and stamped with corporate seal.
12. Company incorporation paperwork.
13. Proof of residence - NOTARIZED lease agreement.
14. "C"-Form.
15. Police Clearance.

Once you have completed the online application, you need to upload scans of your passport photo and mandatory documents. Good luck with this. I scanned my photos at 300 DPI, resized then to 3.5 cm square, and tried to upload. No dice. First the document size was 10.5 centimeters according to the error message. So I resized down to 3 cm square. Now it stated it was 7.5 centimeters. I resized the DPI to 72 pixels per inch and now it was erroring in the other direction - too small at 2.5 centimeters. I spent over an hour carefully resizing and downsampling the image in Photoshop to no avail. I gave up. Making the image 192 pixels square was too big, and resizing it it 191 pixels was too small. I felt like Goldi - fricking - locks.

Here's where it gets even more ridiculous. Good luck getting the correct forms. Since we're also moving house, we needed to get a new "C"-Form for each of us, which needs to be processed at the Police Commissioner's House in Pune. This cannot be done by the foreigner. Your landlord is required by law to do this. You all need to show up and bring your passports and original permits just in case he asks for them. The "C"-Form Counter is only open Monday - Friday from 10-2 and 3-6 PM. They lied when we asked if they were open on Saturday (every other counter was open EXCEPT the "C"-Form Counter). Thanks for wasting my time. AGAIN. We came back again on Monday, only to have the jerk smirking and making us jump for every little thing. He wanted two copies of certain forms, just some. We went to make copies, and then he found another page that needed a second copy. So went and made more copies, then went back again. Now he decided the lease needed to be notarized. So we went back out to find a notary. That took another hour and we returned again, just before they were closing the counter for lunch. He finally stamped the damned papers. Step 1 done.

The next step your landlord has to do is the Police Clearance. You will probably have to accompany them there as well, at least once. Don't say or do anything. Let your landlord handle this completely. Just smile and wave at the police officer if he looks at you. Do not engage. You'll need just about everything you needed for your "C"-Form. We went three times last year and it required a bribe from the person helping me (my broker). We're still trying to secure this paperwork for this renewal process and we only have six days before we are in trouble - we have to get all this stuff done and ready by the 15th, I have been working on this, generating all the paperwork required, for over a month. It's exhausting.

Next, you have to scan your documents. Now, it says only the photo is mandatory. If you have a different visa type, there may be other forms which need to be uploaded before you click on the button to set up an appointment. None of them can be more than 200K. They all have to be PDFs. Every single one of my documents is at LEAST 2 MB. I'm pretty much screwed unless I downsample these documents to basically unreadable, but hey. Not much else I can do. I can't even get the photo upload to work. I'm dreading this next time sink of downsampling all these documents - like I don't have anything better to do with my time. I think I will skip this since only the photos are required.

My next post will hopefully end on a positive note - that we finished the process successfully. I will fill you in with tips and tricks that worked for us in that post. Good luck and share what's worked for you.

e-Commerce Goes to the Dogs Here in India

I recently connected with an entrepreneur in Delhi on Linkedin who was looking for advice on how to improve their web site. Rashi Narang operates "Heads Up for Tails", an e-commerce web site that sells food, pet toys, accessories, apparel, bowls, beds, and more.

I gave her some ideas on how best to tweak the site, and suggested a number of activities she could try to get more exposure. Her site's colors are fairly quiet, but it's busy with animated graphics - a little extra effort is required to understand the mechanics of the site as a user. Her use of big photos, with lots of "cuteness", helps lift the web site experience and engages the user. Her payment process is straightforward (with one minor glitch in Chrome - the checkbox to make the shipping address same as billing address did not work), and offers Cash on Delivery, a big part of online shopping here in India. E-COMMERCE PROFESSIONALS IN INDIA: Always offer a COD payment option. It's the bulk of the payments for e-commerce sites in India. She has successfully connected her social media pages and has made it easy for people to share the site. Overall, it's well thought out.

I told her that I loved her product offering (She has a whole section called "Awesome Toys"!). I told her that I planned to buy a couple of her customized collars for my own pups.

Then she did something super nice. Unexpected. For taking a few minutes out my schedule to give her a thoughtful answer, she offered to send the collars to me, free of cost, as a thank you for my time. Of all the people I have ever advised, she was one of only a handful to ever thank me for doing so. Which brings me to another topic. Mentors, uncles, whoever you go to for advice, should be appreciated for their time. A simple thanks is all that's expected because mentors enjoy sharing ideas, watching people get better at what they do, change their way of thinking, sometimes change their life. Regular updates of what you tried, what you learned, examining what failed are ways to deepen your relationship with that mentor. It what makes us do what we do, with little expected in return.

The collars arrived yesterday. As soon as the guard brought the package and tore it open. They were beautifully wrapped in colourful tissue paper with each collar individually wrapped in plastic for protection. The imitation leather is thick and sturdy, far stronger and well constructed than I had expected. The little rhinestone letters spelling out their names looked awesome! I couldn't wait to get home to try them on the pups.

These photos aren't the best, and the dogs weren't cooperating, but I hope you get a sense of Heads Up for Tails' product line. They're gorgeous and I plan to visit the site often, especially seeing how quick their delivery was. :-) If you have pets, check out "Heads Up for Tails". I'm sure you will be as delighted as I was.

Eunice, dozing with her new collar.

Eunice, dozing with her new collar.

Ethel, liking her new collar.

Ethel, showing the other side of her collar.

Eunice again.

Ethel.

Don't they look cute? :-)

We're moving to Pune!

Will and I will be moving to Pune in January. I have accepted a new position with iPlace USA, a recruitment process outsourcing service provider, running their sister company, iPlace India. In an expanded Senior Vice President role, I will be in charge of HR, marketing, leadership development and career coaching, and responsible for all new initiatives for expanding the company and achieving the business goals. It's going to be AWESOME. Even better, the CEO is American and we're in synch with where the company should go and how we can grow it together as a team. The company has made some amazing hires and while most of the staff are very young, they have tremendous potential. The company works hard to treat everyone fairly, there is parity across the organization, and employees are compensated based on their performance and effectiveness, not by who the managers like or are related to. Nice change. Some of the managers in place are extremely impressive and I look forward to working with these rock stars. :-)

We're super excited! Will is looking for the right college and there are plenty of very good schools in Pune. We'll be closer to Mumbai and south Goa, a couple of our favorite places in India, and will enable us to focus our travels in the south of India, where we haven't spent much time. We've been all over the north of this great country, but the backwaters of Kerala are calling, Pondicherry has been whispering in my ear for years now, and the fact that I've never been to Bangalore is almost embarrassing to make public.

So, this blog will effectively end with this post. My thanks to all my readers, for all of your great feedback, support, laughs and fury. It's been a tough slog these past few years. I will deeply miss my current co-workers, some of the best and brightest women (and a few good men!) I've ever worked with, here or overseas. But fear not, dear reader! I have set up another blog, focused on Pune at http://american-in-pune.blogspot.com. Check it out! Subscribe to it, like it, share it amongst your friends and we'll continue our brilliant conversations from there, okay? Follow me!

Onward,
Jeanne

All the News

RebelMouse has come up with a neat embed script that enables you to curate across the "interwebs" and post in one place. Kind of awesome. Actually, all sorts of awesome.

Truth in Advertising - Recruiting Staff in India

At a previous company, I had to manage staff that were completely untrustworthy, never followed through on projects, always had excuses why they couldn't work on projects, completed work poorly and were generally difficult to manage. Exacerbating the problem was top management who never shared projects with middle management but went direct to managed staff to get work done with no regard as to how other work was to be completed.

That said, I did my work to the best of my ability AND their work. One individual, who had the title of Senior Marketing Manager was by far the worst. Whenever asked where he was with a project, he had always never started it because he was "working on another project for the CEO". His work was shoddy at best, rife with misspellings. Once he had an entire trade show project, booth panels, printed deliverables, etc. to work on and instead of using a reputable translation service, took it upon himself to pocket to costs and use Google Translate to put everything in Russian; it was a complete disaster. Did he get into trouble for this? No. When I asked for him to be replaced, the COO said that he had hired him personally and it was my responsibility to mentor him. While I agree with the concept, there is only so much that can be taught to someone who doesn't want to learn.

I'm no longer with the firm, but yesterday, I got a connection request on Linkedin from him. Here's what his Summary on linkedin states:

Hmm. Sounds familiar, methinks. First, he is writing sentences in proper English, something he was unable to do in the three years I got emails from him. Here's my summary:

Hmmm.  So what does he say he does at the company we both worked for?

Interesting. While he played a role in packaging and did all of the photography, he was not involved in any other aspect he has stated were his responsibilities. There is no way that he could write a requirements doc, do social media, write a film brief - he can't write a decent sentence in English. Here's mine:

A lot of what's written on his is from a previous version of my resume, something which he has in his possession because one time I had given him my backup external drive while at a trade show for him to use in case a project came in that required him to work on projects I'd been developing. He had copied EVERYTHING, including my personal files, photos, etc. onto his computer while performing none of the work he was supposed to work on. No one seemed to think this was an issue.

Unless his title really changed, he's still Senior Marketing Manager, not Creative Head. And he's still no good.

This is not an isolated case. I see hundreds of resumes that are cut and pasted from other people's CVs. Recruiters tell me that the single toughest issue they fight in recruiting staff in India is the veracity of people's CVs. This manager will likely find something else to do, another employer who thinks he can actually do this work, which he very much can't. And that's too bad, because honest hardworking staff should get that position, not a liar. I feel bad for the company that hires him because what they expect as an employee is hardly what he represent himself to be.

What do you think about this issue? As a recruiter? Potential hire? As a company?

Will the "I" in BRIC become Indonesia? CNN Says So.

What Indian Management Needs to Understand About the Global Economy

I watch CNN a lot. Recently on "Quest Means Business", Quest asked an Indian business analyst, "Aren't you concerned about India's failure to deliver?" Fareed Zakari of "GPS" on CNN recently did a spot on the potential of Indonesia and forecasted that with India's slowing growth, and Indonesia's rise, that BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India & China) may soon replace the "I" in BRIC with Indonesia.

There are substantial flaws in India's ability to evolve, from its lack of quality education for the majority of its citizens, its substantial failing at providing infrastructure (roads, water, electricity, housing, etc.), and by far the worst, the deep, long term and entrenched corruption at local, state and national levels. Manufacturing and (some) innovation have been making substantial change, but I keep hearing, "Where is India's Google, Facebook, or Groupon?" What's built here, while some are wildly successful, are copycats, not gamechangers.

Indians like to point at the Tata Nano as a gamechanger and I scoff at that, especially for India. While the idea at heart makes sense, there problems that make it not a game changer:
1. It is a cheap car for the masses in a country of 1 billion that doesn't have roads to handle the current traffic.
2. It uses fossil fuels. If this car was green -- electric, or built on a Stirling engine using hydrogen, thereby reducing CO2 in a country rapidly succumbing to the worst pollution levels in the world, it could have been a gamechanger.
3. It's not as cheap as it was supposed to be. The design itself has issues (try fixing a stall on the road - you have to take the back seat out to access key components) so it won't work in Western countries (and I'm not sure it has the emissions technology built in to allow it to be sold in the EU or California).
4. An industry insider said that 25% of the components that make up the Nano are manufactured in China.
5. It was a marketing disaster.

Another weakness than many Indian companies have selling overseas is that many don't respect that the customer is king and you need to respond to them as such. One Indian CEO said to me. "Why should I bother with customer service when there are a billion of us here?" Ethics are expected in global business. Excellent customer service is expected. Product quality is demanded, on time at the price quoted. This issue becomes more dominant when working with Western buyers because we don't negotiate off proposal prices. What you've presented, we usually believe to be the final price. We respect that and pay it. Our Indian vendors consider us fools for doing so, thus their existing high profits. This is changing as salaries continue to rise and Western companies go elsewhere.

So where should Indian companies go? Start domestically. Every MNC is salivating on India's fast rising domestic market and there's a lot of money up for grabs. Foreign products go for high prices due to draconian tariffs, but people are willing to pay for them because they expect a quality product and customer service, things they're not sure they'll get with a domestic product. The Chinese have been successful here by producing low quality goods at a price that's more affordable, providing long term pricing contacts that allow for minimized risk, even though there are conflicts on their shared border. India is trying to keep the "Giant from the North" from flooding their market with cheap goods, but they're coming in anyway, cutting into the domestic market that India's companies should already be serving.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/huawei-will-china-conquer-the-world/article2243928/

Another issue is culture. Middle managers build fiefdoms for themselves and seek short term solutions, instead of convincing their seniors on long term strategies that will sustain them over the next decade instead of the next year. Incentives based on performance need to be standard practice. Communications from the CEO all the way down to the tea boy needs to be clear, measurable and effective. People need to know what you want, when you want it, and engage across the company, You're a team, people, not silos of information and skills sets to set upon each other in a drag-out fight for supremacy.

Invest in serious innovation, not copying other companies. Sure, you might be able to copy a widget, even make it better at a lower price, but that's not really innovation. Make a widget that the consumer doesn't know he wants yet. Find ways to see a problem and come up with a different, more elegant solution. Figure out how to change the world. That's innovation, and if Indian companies really do start investing in real innovation, no one would question the "I" in BRIC. Watch out.