Tourist guide license renewal

My tourist guide license was issued in January 2010 and it was valid up to 29th of January, 2013. My license said that I needed to surrender my license 45 days before the date of expiry in order to get it renewed. I started contacting Ministry of Tourism office in New Delhi and it seemed like they did not have any information. Every time I contacted them they said that I should contact my local tourist guide association. It was a very big problem for me because I never took any membership of any guide association in Varanasi. Finally I got some information from one of my friends in Delhi. He had the proforma of the form I need to fill up.

He also told me that I needed to go to Delhi personally to deposit my license with tourism office. My friend suggested me to talk with the Delhi office before leaving for Delhi. I contacted the Delhi office and they told me a really strange rule that they would accept renewal application only on Wednesday, Thursday and Fridays in the second and third week of January. I was already booked for the second week hence I had to cancel a couple of bookings from the first week and flew to Delhi. I reached at the tourism office in Delhi around 11 AM and they asked me come after 4 PM. I thought that they asked me to come later because maybe the concerned office was not present there.

I was just wandering around here and there for 5 hours and finally when I reached there again by 4, the same officer whom I met in the morning took my application, made me sign on a few papers and issued me a temporary license which said that my license was under renewal process hence I am allowed to work as a regional level tourist guide till 31st of April. I have no idea why they called me to Delhi if they only wanted me to sign a few papers or made me wait for 5 hours if the same person from the morning was responsible for issuing my license. If it was all about signing a few papers then they should have better organized it by post or online. I don’t know when we will start using our IT knowledge for ourselves. Anyways, everything went well but I didn’t like going to Delhi.